LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Smzu. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BELIEF. 



BY 




GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY, 

AUTHOR OF "EVERY-DAY LIFE AND EVERY-DAY MORALS, n "ALHOA : 
TRAVELS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS;" ETC. 




BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1889. 






Copyright, 1889, 
By George Leonard Chaney. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 






CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. Introductory 3 

II. Man 23 

III. God 41 

IV. Christ 63 

V. The Spirit 79 

VI. Hell 97 

VII. Heaven 117 

VIII. A Church 141 






I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



BELIEF. 



i. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. — Matt. v. 17. 

TT is said that the block of marble from 
A which Michael Angelo called forth his 
mighty statue of David, had been brought to 
Florence for another purpose. Some earlier 
artist had designed another subject for it, and 
failed in the attempt to realize it. But An- 
gelo/ seeing the big block and noting its con- 
tour and inclination, foresaw the heroic figure 
imprisoned there, and released him with blow 
on blow of his redeeming mallet. 

Something like this is the mission of the 
new movement in and about the Christian 
Church to-day. It has not come to destroy, 
unless you say that Michael Angelo destroyed 
the shapeless block he converted into such 



INTRODUCTORY. 



a royal David : it has come to fulfil. It 
takes the mistaken or only partly developed 
study of a former artist, and makes something 
true, manlike, soulful out of it. Where for- 
mer generations found only an unshapen 
mass just as it came from the rock whence 
it was hewn, and left it almost as inhuman 
as it found it, the Christianity which accepts 
and uses all the light and truth of the latest 
discovery, as well as of ancient tradition, dis- 
covers and re-creates a symmetrical figure. 
Or, letting imagery go, let us say that the 
gospel we come to preach is not a gospel of 
mere negation, content to destroy the creeds 
and forms of the past, but it has a constructive 
and redeeming purpose in every blow it strikes 
at false doctrine, misshapen form, or tyrannous 
polity. It is an entire misconception of the 
spirit and final effect of freedom, criticism, 
and reformation in the Church, to think 
that disintegration or ruin is their necessary 
outcome. This is so far from being true, that 
precisely the opposite effects may be claimed 
for them ; since the Church — that is, organized 
religion — in its teaching and worship has only 



INTRO D UCTOR Y 



maintained itself heretofore by gradual but 
sure adaptations of its views to the discoveries 
of science, the requirements of a complex 
civilization, and the conclusions and inclu- 
sions of a larger and fuller process of induc- 
tion. The very foes, as they seemed, to the 
permanence of the Church have thus proved 
its friends. The transitions from the cradle 
to the crib and from the crib to the open 
bed may have their perils, but they are such 
as every growing youth must encounter ; and 
shall religion be the only thing exempt from 
progress (the one eternal baby), when natural 
history and philosophy, political economy and 
civil polity, commerce and art and industry, 
and all the other interests of man are forever 
adding to their experience and conforming 
their ways to their increasing knowledge 
and changed conditions ? If this were true, 
the Church would have the unenviable dis- 
tinction of being the only association of men 
that could never learn. As a fact, the history 
of the Christian Church shows how constantly 
it has learned and adjusted itself to its new 
views. Every great discovery in science has 



INTRODUCTORY. 



been followed by agitation, opposition, dis- 
cussion, reconsideration, and finally by adop- 
tion and readjustment. The illustrations and 
proofs of this statement are now so well known 
by all reading and thinking persons that they 
need no repetition. The searching sciences 
of geology and astronomy have fulfilled the 
promise of "a new heaven and a new earth." 
From Ptolemy's crystalline spheres to the 
illimitable ether in which unnumbered suns 
and worlds revolve and course, is a journey 
of discovery which compels a corresponding 
travel and expanse of mind. The first effect 
of this demonstration of the endless population 
of the skies, whose stars outnumber the hu- 
man inhabitants of the earth, is paralyzing. 
The mind shuts its eyes, and begs to be re- 
lieved of the insupportable sight. Yet the 
census of the starry heavens is not complete, 
and the new telescopes are waiting to report 
to us new sails upon the bosom of the infinite 
deep. The child in his nurse's arms holding 
up his little hands to clutch a star, is hardly 
more removed in knowledge from the astrono- 
mer of to-day than is the most enlightened 



INTRODUCTORY. 



astronomer of a thousand years ago. So new 
in discovery, so old in reality, are the heavens 
that stretch above our generation! And 
what the new astronomy has done for our 
larger apprehension of the skies, geology has 
done for the earth ; so that we may find in 
its slowly made strata and slowly evolved ani- 
mals and plants a demonstration of a practical 
eternity behind us, as overwhelming as the 
evidence of a practical infinity above us. 

The probable discovery of the origin of 
species in variations from a common stem, 
and of the correlation of forces whereby sound 
and light are conceived as wave and wavelet 
on a common sea, and heat and light as in- 
terchangeable, and electricity as born of the 
one and father of the other, — these and 
kindred physical discoveries suggest a unity 
beyond themselves and a oneness in the First 
Cause, which monotheism postulates. 

The study of comparative philology, with 
its demonstration by means of common roots 
of unsuspected identities in races as far re- 
moved in aspect and location as the Hindus 
and the Europeans, comes to strengthen the 



INTRODUCTORY. 



argument for unity ; and the sympathetic 
investigation of the sacred literature of the 
ethnic religions goes far to suggest a com- 
mon inspiration of one spirit of truth, albeit 
encumbered by a common though unequal 
burden of human ignorance, impertinence, 
and immaturity. 

The burning question in the heat of all 
this modern discovery is this : What will be 
its effect upon religion, or how will it affect 
the views of men on religious subjects ? That 
it must and will have an influence upon these 
supreme concerns of man, no thoughtful man 
can doubt. Some men say that modern dis- 
covery has put out ancient revelation ; that 
there is nothing left of traditional Christianity 
on which truth-loving men can rely ; that it 
leans too much on historical evidences of the 
career of Jesus instead of basing itself on the 
eternal facts of Nature and the soul ; that the 
conceit of a universe centred in this world 
was at the bottom of Church theology, and 
with the doing away with that conceit the 
corresponding anthropocentric theology must 
go with it ; that the human conceptions of 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

deity with which popular Christianity abounds 
are put to doubt and shame by the demon- 
stration of an ever-proceeding creativeness 
working on an infinite scale, in which the fate 
or fortunes of man are merely incidental, not 
final ; that unity, not trinity, is the symbol 
of the real deity, — one in all, not one in 
three ; and that the scheme of the divine 
government hitherto accounted orthodox is 
so hopelessly out of repair, that it would be 
best economy to take it down and build anew 
from the foundation. 

I propose to consider some of these posi- 
tions in a series of papers which we will call, 
" The Conservative Purpose and Influence 
of Radical Christianity." 

I have purposely chosen as my subjects the 
large single names, under which anything 
pertaining to such subjects may be suitably 
said, — " Man," "God," "Christ," "Hell," 
"Heaven." According to the ideas these 
words call up in our minds, all our religious 
life proceeds. I know some of the difficulties 
in the way of clear thought on these great 
themes j but some belief about them every 



10 INTRODUCTORY. 

man must have, and on that belief he is always 
more or less consciously acting. Agnosticism 
is only a name for a vain attempt to shut our 
minds away from religious subjects. Gener- 
ally they who declare that they know nothing 
and can know nothing of God, really know 
most of that great mass of testimony which 
is laid up in earth and sky and man and beast, 
and therefore are best fitted if they will to 
make the passage from the things that are 
made to the invisible things of God, even his 
everlasting power and divinity. They are also 
best acquainted with human history and liter- 
ature, and therefore best prepared to weigh 
the evidence for Christ and immortality. 

I have such faith in the safety of all thorough 
and reverent inquiry, and such belief in the 
truth of essential Christianity, that I run no 
risk in anticipating at the start the really 
saving effect of such an investigation as we 
propose to bestow upon such a subject. In 
all events, I am sure that nothing is gained 
by adroit evasion, wilful shutting of one's 
eyes, a substitute for conviction to be ob- 
tained by mere repetition of creeds and 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

psalms, — effigies, those responses in stone to 
the soul's cry for bread ; or rites that charm 
the senses while they shock the common-sense ; 
and systems that, like the burglar, chloroform 
the reason before they despoil the house. 

I shall take my cue in this proceeding not 
only from the text of Jesus, " I am not come 
to destroy but to fulfil," but also from the 
way in which he unfolded that text, — " Ye 
have heard that it hath been said by them of 
old time thou shalt not kill, and whosoever 
shall kill shall be in danger of the Judgment ; 
but I say unto you that whosoever is angry 
with his brother shall be in danger of the 
Judgment." The new version omits that 
saving clause, " without a cause," though 
many ancient manuscripts have it. But it 
is more probable that Jesus did not use it. 
To be angry with another with or without 
cause is to be in danger of the Judgment? 
because so few men know how to be right- 
eously angry : they generally end by being 
unrighteously mad. But our present purpose 
with this commandment is not to argue for 
or against it. I instance it for the illustration 



12 INTRODUCTORY. 

it affords of what Jesus meant by fulfilling the 
law. To his mind the Law was something 
above the laws. Laws are made for the 
maintenance of civil order and the social 
peace ; as such they are local and variable. 
Jesus takes one of these laws, — that against 
murder; a law as necessary and as nearly 
universal as any in the history of legislation, 
— and he runs the sin back of the overt deed 
down to its lair, the angry heart of man, and 
declares that to indulge in murderous, con- 
temptuous, or abusive feelings or expressions 
is incipient killing, and guilty in the eye of 
that Law which is over the laws. 

Notice how he fulfils the law which aims 
to protect human life ; namely, by pushing 
its prohibitions and penalties to the inmost 
thoughts and imaginations of the heart. 

So with the Seventh Commandment; the 
lustful eye is indicted at the bar of justice. 
" Thou shalt not forswear thyself " is fairly 
annulled by the larger command, " Swear not 
at all." The lex talionis, or law of retaliation, 
which was all that Moses as a practical legis- 
lator could require, Jesus exactly reversed. 



INTRO D UCTOR V. 1 3 

It was the only way in which the real purpose 
of the " eye for eye " and the " tooth for 
tooth " law could be thoroughly accomplished. 
Moses, because of the hardness of their hearts, 
suffered certain things to go on among the 
Jews ; but the real object of his legislation 
must be sought, not in such indulgences, but 
in their prevention of still greater evils. As to 
the ancient law which prescribed love to one's 
neighbor and hatred to one's enemy, Jesus en- 
larged that by absorbing all the exceptions 
and making universal love the only law. 

Perhaps these examples are enough to show 
how broadly he was speaking when he said 
that he had come to fulfil the law, not to 
destroy it. He did not consider the enunci- 
ation of a higher law, even if it collided with 
some of the specific legislation of Moses, as 
destructive ; on the contrary, it was rather 
the fulfilment of the great end for which all 
this partial legislation had been enacted. 
Those who fix their faith and plant their 
affections on this or that special law for the 
accomplishment of some good end, and cannot 
conceive of any different or better way of 



14 INTRODUCTORY. 

reaching it (idolaters of the statutes shall we 
call them ?), do not know what to make of a 
reformer who seeks to go back of legislation 
to the heart of man, whence all law-breaking 
proceeds. 

I am willing to take the examples already 
adduced from the Sermon on the Mount as 
models for the process of preservation-by- 
advance, to which we are summoned by the 
discoveries of our age. There is a way, — and 
Jesus has commended it and used it with brave 
thoroughness, — a way in which inherited 
half-truths may become full-orbed by present 
revelations. Earthly legislation may more 
and more conform itself to the higher law, 
and thus escape destruction by accepting ful- 
filment. It is not their death but their res- 
urrection which is wrought by the expansion 
of ancient laws and prophecies to the dimen- 
sions of modern science. And so, if as we 
pursue our inquiry into old forms of belief 
we seem sometimes to destroy them, let us 
not be deceived, — remembering him who did 
not hesitate to transcend the laws of Moses 
that he might fulfil the law of God ; remem- 



INTRODUCTORY. 15 

bering him who reformed the prophecies of 
men that he might redeem the promises of 
their Inspirer. 

In one or another exigency of life we see 
the law better fulfilled by its infraction than 
by its keeping. Florence Nightingale tak- 
ing the responsibility of disregarding official 
red-tape that she might secure the needed 
restoratives for her soldiers, is an example in 
place. Enid, in the " Idylls of the King/' turn- 
ing back to warn her husband of robbers in 
the way, although in doing so she disobeyed 
his stern injunction, is another instance. 
Sometimes one must break the letter of the 
law in order to keep its spirit ; and sometimes 
in the progress of society the provisions of 
one age become out of place or inapplicable 
in another. Thus in old England to-day there 
are funds at interest which were left by men 
zealous for " the faith/' for the express pur- 
pose of furnishing w^ood with which to burn 
heretics. Now that " baptism by fire " is 
no longer applied to unbelievers, what shall 
be done with the fund is a difficult question. 
Possibly a free delivery of wood to the heretic 



16 INTRODUCTORY. 

for his warming and comforting, although 
directly contrary to the terms of the charity, 
would be the better way of defending the 
faith. I adduce such examples merely to 
vindicate the possibility of accomplishing wor- 
thy ends by disregarding old-time provisions 
for those ends, or by revising such provisions 
in the light of a later experience. And when 
such revision and restatement are made, I 
claim, on the authority of the example of 
Jesus himself, that this is not destroying but 
fulfilling the law and the prophets. 

The trouble in the Christian Church to-day 
is its clinging to ancient formularies and 
modes of belief when they have ceased to 
express truly the present convictions of the 
worshipper. In any reasonable use of words 
the creeds misstate the confessor's faith; and 
the worship which compels him to repeat 
them is all the while training him either in 
open falsehood or duplicity. The case is only 
a little better when the worship omits the 
repetition of the creed, but assumes in all its 
spoken prayer and praise the consent of the 
congregation in its doctrine. The one is a 



INTRODUCTORY. 17 

spoken, the other an acted falsehood ; and no 
skill in explanation or apology can make it 
anything else. Of course this criticism does 
not apply to those who believe the doctrines, 
or to casual worshippers in a church, or to 
persons unconnected by profession with it; 
but membership in all creeded churches 
means acceptance of its creed, and men w r ho 
do not believe it have no right either to re- 
peat it or to silently endorse it. The uneasy 
consciousness that they have travelled far 
away from the mediaeval theology of their 
established articles shows itself even among 
good churchmen in the custom they have of 
speaking of their creeds as " symbols." Now, 
a symbol is the sign of some moral thing by 
the image of some natural thing, — as a lion, 
of courage; a lamb, of patience, etc. This 
is precisely what a creed is not, although it 
is sometimes confused with symbols. 

Still another refinement of speech is re- 
sorted to by way of justifying the repetition 
of the creed, as when it is said that men may 
not profess to knoiv all that they on the 

whole believe. But this is rather an after- 

2 



18 INTRODUCTORY. 

thought than the conscious forethought of 
the worshipper. His creed means, and he 
so understands it, that what it professes may 
be relied upon as assured truth, and can only 
be doubted at the peril of the soul's salvation. 
I have read in Stanley's " Essays on Church 
and State " a defence of subscription to the 
" thirty-nine articles," even though you do 
not believe one of them, on the ground that 
you accept on the whole the body of doc- 
trine therein delivered, — a process which 
seems to me much like breaking every one 
of the Ten Commandments and then claim- 
ing that you have kept the law as a 
whole. 

I do not believe that the truths of reli- 
gion can be thus trifled with. It is a doubt- 
ful truth that cannot be clearly expressed. 
A mystery may be a proper object of awful 
adoration, but it has no place in a creed ; 
for that is an appeal to clear thought. 

Surely, a factor so potent in a problem so 
critical cannot take too much pains to make 
itself correct. There are sins of belief as well 
as of unbelief, as a recent eminent writer has 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

pointed out. 1 And when, to quote his criteria, 
" men's professed beliefs are due to negligence, 
undue yielding to emotions whether blame- 
less or blameworthy, or to a contrary will," 
then men are culpable for holding and main- 
taining them, — just as culpable as other men 
who are unbelieving for the same reasons. 

I wish, and I hope, that the inquiry we 
propose into some of the received doctrines 
of the Christian churches mav result in bet- 
ter apprehension of the meaning of these 
doctrines than we have had heretofore, and 
also a clearer understanding of what is still 
tenable in them and what has passed away. 

With the improved methods of naval war- 
fare, that nation which trusts to lofty ships 
and stone forts for its defence is justly deemed 
behind the times and hopelessly exposed. It 
will not be found otherwise with that church 
which undertakes to meet the attacks of 
modern infidelity with deck upon deck of 
vulnerable dogmas or old-time fortresses of 
ritual and song. The age is clamorous for the 

1 Saint- George Mivart, in Nineteenth Century, October, 

1888. 



20 INTRODUCTORY. 

truth, and nothing less than the free pursuit 
of truth will satisfy it. It does not first ask, 
" What is useful/' or " What is expedient/' 
or " What is beautiful/' or " What is touch- 
ing/' in the religion offered to it. It asks, 
" What is true/' and there is an uneasy sense 
of insecurity in the most beautiful church and 
the most emotional service unless the wor- 
shipper can feel the firm ground of reality and 
truth under his feet. 

It will be the object of these discourses to 
find some basis of truth and reality on which 
to plant the feet of active charity, and where 
a genuine devotion may kneel without super- 
stition or fear. Not to destroy or undermine 
the foundations of essential Christianity 
(which we believe to be one with true re- 
ligion) would we labor, but rather to fulfil 
what Moses and the Prophets and Jesus have 
spoken, — in a gospel true to their uplifting 
purpose, because fitted to the added revela- 
tions of a later time. In this endeavor, we 
invoke the leading of the Spirit of Truth, 
confident in his promise who said, " It shall 
guide you into all truth." 



II. 

MAN. 



II. 

MAN. 

What is man? — Psalm viii. 4. 

\T7HAT is man? A featherless biped ; an 
animal that cooks his food before he 
eats it; the creature that laughs; an ani- 
mal that works by tools ; one that acts by 
reason, not merely by instinct; an animal 
that makes progress, both individually and 
in the mass ; the only animal that uses ar- 
ticulate language and has abstract concep- 
tions ; the latest and highest living organism 
on this earth ; a creature made in God's im- 
age ; a living soul, a quickening spirit ; a 
son of God, a child of wrath ; a creature of 
a day, an heir of immortality. 

All these and numberless other definitions 
of man have been given ; and all of them 
have some basis of evidence to go upon. 



24 MAN. 

Many of them we may waive as soon as 
mentioned, as they do not bear upon the 
theological question which we are pursuing. 
The critical question in this connection is 
whether man is a fallen creature, with a 
natural tendency to go lower; or whether 
he is an imperfect creature, with an upward 
motion and destiny. The former is the tra- 
ditional Church view. It is based upon the 
Biblical story of Adam. He being the first 
man and having sinned, the consequences of 
his sin are in all human kind by way of he- 
redity. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, 
and the children's teeth are set on edge." 
If this is the true genealogy of sin, then the 
traditional view has all the support which 
the law of heredity can give it, backed by 
the authority of Hebrew scripture. 

We cannot, if we would, evade the well at- 
tested law of hereditary influence. Whatever 
is in the parents does come out in children 
or children's children. But this law applies 
as well to good qualities as to evil, and there 
is as much room in it for hope as for despair, — 
unless we are driven to the belief in the pre- 



MAN. 25 

ponderance of evil over good in man. The 
commonly received view in the churches 
asserts this preponderance of evil ; it even 
goes so far as to deny the presence of any 
good in the unfortunate descendants of Adam, 
his transgression having made man " utterly 
indisposed and opposite to all good." Why 
one wrong deed should be so much more 
influential than numberless acts of obedience 
we are not told. No natural law that we are 
acquainted with would explain it ; nor has 
any dependence upon such a law been re- 
sorted to until recent times, when the pop- 
ularity of science has led a defender of the 
old faith to seek to run the surety of natural 
law into the spiritual world. The all-sufficient 
evidence, as its theological advocates have 
believed, is in the Bible. The doctrine of 
man's sin in Adam, and man's consequent 
" total depravity," rests upon certain texts, 
which are found in the Hebrew and Christian 
scriptures. 

The patient and unbiassed reading of these 
scriptures, with no other purpose than that 
of getting at their real significance, is calcu- 



26 MAN 

lated to impress a man with their marvellous 
truth to human nature. I do not know of 
any other book or set of books, of the same 
size, which begins to equal the human- 
naturalness of the Bible. Men speak of it as 
a revelation of God, and so it is in places ; 
but it is a revelation of man all the way 
through. If its divinity is ever called in 
question, its humanity cannot be. The very 
features in it to which the critics take excep- 
tion as a record of the divine proceeding, are 
a witness to the recorder's human nature. I 
do not object, therefore, to an appeal to the 
Bible as a witness to human nature if all its 
evidence is taken ; but I do object to an appeal 
which fastens upon a few texts, whose sense 
must be sought in the local incidents which 
occasioned them, and which makes them the 
proof of the dogma of total depravity. If 
God " saw that the wickedness of man was 
great, and that every imagination of the 
thoughts of his heart was only evil continu- 
ally," in the time of Noah, he also saw that 
Noah was a man " perfect in his generation, 
and walking with God." 



MAN. 27 

Again, if we are to take the extreme ut- 
terances of despondent saints in their hours 
of despair at the too frequent success of evil 
in its conflict with good in human society 
and in their own souls as the true picture 
of human nature, omitting the testimony of 
brighter hours, and forgetting that this very 
despair is a proof of dignity in the being 
they despair of, — then this inky dogma may 
prevail and blot the whole page of Nature. 

But so far is the Bible, taken as a whole, 
from being a witness to the Church doctrine 
of total depravity, that its appeals to man to 
choose the right, to do the truth, and come 
to the light, and its numberless instances of 
virtuous choice and action by men whom the 
extremest reach of religious courtesy could 
not class as regenerate in the Church sense 
of that word, show that it is not responsible 
for this dogma. 

But "Is not the story of Adam in the 
Bible ? " it may be asked ; " and is that not 
enough to place his descendants among fallen 
and falling creatures ? " 

Yes, if that story is taken for veritable 



28 MAN 

history, instead of suggestive allegory. But 
it is one thing to be fallen, and another thing 
to be utterly cast down ; and if we admit the 
fact of man's departure from innocence, we 
are not going to admit his entire apostasy 
from good. 

The fact of sin is a part of human con- 
sciousness. We shall say nothing to diminish 
its reality or the weight of its shame and en- 
feeblement ; but, on the other hand, we find no 
sufficient evidence either in our own conscious- 
ness or in Scripture for the dogma of total de- 
pravity. Take this story of Adam's fall, which 
is one of many attempts to account for the pre- 
sence of evil in the world. I do not believe it 
is true as a fact of history. I believe that it is 
an attempt to tell the experience of each heart 
in its fall from a state of innocence into a state 
of conscious fault, in the manner of an old- 
time legend. As an allegory of this universal 
experience, it is beautiful and suggestive. It 
is also true to the fact of individual fall. But 
cast in the form of history, and made to stand 
in all its details for a veritable account of 
what happened to the first man, it seems to 



MAN. 29 

me improbable. It takes its place with many 
other explanations of the phenomena of this 
world, as a theory according to appearances. 
Like all early science, it seeks to give an 
explanation of things as they appear ; and 
because the sun seems to revolve around the 
earth, early astronomy so represents it. 
Confronted with the innocence of childhood, 
succeeded by the sinful consciousness of later 
life, the commentator literally puts upon 
Adam the infirmity of us all. In a wonderfully 
skilful allegory he dramatizes the universal 
experience of mankind, and the tragedy of 
Adam has come in time to be accepted as the 
early history of man. It holds its place now 
in human acceptance, not only on account of 
the authority of Scripture, but because it is 
so remarkably true to every man's conscious- 
ness. He knows that he has sinned and 
passed from a state of innocence into a state 
of exile from the Eden of his first estate. It 
is an easy inference, therefore, that his earliest 
ancestor did the same ; the differences be- 
tween Adam's story and his own experiences 
are no more than every outward setting of an 



30 MAN. 

inward fact requires. In the absence of all 
contradictory knowledge in the early days 
when such stories were first told, what should 
hinder their being taken as scientific state- 
ments of actual facts? But in these later 
times, when geology has demonstrated the 
immense antiquity of the earth, and the 
presence of death here long before Adam 
lived or sinned; and when sober scientists 
think that there were many Adams, or at 
least that mankind is not all descended from 
a single pair, — in these busy and enterpris- 
ing days, when the necessary labors involved 
in tilling the earth and creating wealth are 
rather regarded as good economies than the 
result of a curse, the details of the story of 
Eden can no longer be accounted either his- 
tory or science. 

" What then is man ? " the question recurs. 
If you no longer deem him the lost and ruined 
creature which popular theology has painted 
him, how will you define him ? 

Without denying or seeking to explain for 
the moment the consciousness of fault, 
which is a permanent part of human con- 



MAN. 31 

sciousness, — leaving that for later considera- 
tion, — I will say that the evidence of modern 
research and discovery seems to show that 
man is the latest result of a long process of 
upward-moving energy at work on the earth. 
In accordance with the principle of develop- 
ment of each higher form from some lower 
form, it seems most probable that man has 
been thus developed: and by the law of 
heredity, which works with that of varia- 
tion, it follows that man retains a part of all 
that has gone before him. On this theory, 
commonly known as Evolution, we have an 
explanation of the mixed and seemingly 
incongruous elements that appear in man. 
Neither brute nor angel, he has affiliations 
with the one and aspirations toward the other. 
We may not be able to determine the moment 
when he passed from the state of brute 
innocence into that of human sin ; but that 
passage is the real beginning of his manhood. 
The consciousness of sin is the demonstration 
of moral character. The sin is as bad as it 
can be painted, but the consciousness of it 
"gives the world the assurance of a man." 



32 MAN. 

Henceforth the typical human life proceeds, 
and he is most a man in whom the conscious- 
ness of blame-worthiness for transgressions of 
the law of righteousness is strongest. Thus, 
so far from relieving men from a sense of the 
sinfulness of sin, the modern theory of man's 
origin and way of progress through moral 
sensitiveness deepens this wholesome con- 
viction. What comparison is there between 
that view of my discovered sinfulness which 
leads me to throw all the blame of it on 
Adam, and that view which compels me to 
take the shame of it myself? 

We do not get rid of the animal in us by de- 
nying our animal derivation, while by admit- 
ting it we do account in a natural way for much 
that is otherwise wholly inexplicable. And 
if the essence of sin is the preference of lower 
to higher satisfactions, we shall find ourselves 
summoned to nobler ends by the stinging 
certainty that in choosing animal delights w T e 
are falling back on the brute. The resentment 
which even the lowest man exhibits at being 
called by the name of the brute which he 
most resembles shows how distinctly man con- 



MAN. 33 

ceives his superiority. Every relapse to the 
brute condition is accompanied by a sense of 
degradation and sin. I am speaking of man 
as he now is, — of man as we know him to-day. 
And that is, strictly speaking, the only question 
before us, — What is man ? Not what was he, 
or what may he become? The discussion of 
his origin is only pertinent to the question 
as throwing some possible light on the situa- 
tion as we now find it. It would not be 
necessary if the old theology had not endeav- 
ored to fix the present status of humanity on 
the basis of Adam's original sin. We protest 
against that for reasons already given, and we 
show some of the reasons which incline us to 
prefer the explanations of modern science con- 
cerning man's origin, rather than the ancient 
legend of the book of Genesis. Both theories 
have to face a very intricate problem when 
they look man in the face and endeavor to ex- 
plain him. What we find there depends very 
much on what we bring to the search. To 
the brooding poet " what a piece of work is 
man ! how noble in reason ! how infinite in 
faculties ! in form and moving how express 



34 MAN. 

and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! 
in apprehension, how like a god ! " In an- 
other mood the same tongue declares : " Man 
delights me not, nor woman either." To 
estimate such various judgments aright we 
must know the standpoint of the judge and 
what phase of humanity he is looking at. 
The same remark applies to the various wit- 
nesses in the Bible : " the spirit of the proph- 
ets is subject to the prophets." Pope, in his 
" Essay on Man," passes from one position to 
another ; but you feel that he is most at 
home with his subject when he essays to 
satirize man's weaknesses : — 

" Created half to rise and half to fall; 
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all ; 
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled ; 
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.' ' 

Fortunately no theory of man's origin 
affects very much the question what he is. 
He is what we see and know him to be to- 
day. Whatever he was or whatever he may 
become, man is a being amenable to the 
law of right ; capable of virtue ; responsive to 
moving appeals to his humanity ; subject to 



MAN. 35 

wonder, love, and awe in the presence of 
worshipful objects or ideas; sensible of his 
faults and shortcomings ; convicted of sin in 
the presence of ideal goodness ; and so loyal 
to good in his inmost heart that he feels 
himself a rebel against God in every choice 
of wrong desire or doing. 

With so much known and attested by our 
own consciousness, no man has cause to be 
ashamed of his nature or doubtful of his high 
calling. He may and he must feel chagrined 
and shocked at himself as he perceives the 
disparity between his doing and his calling ; 
but he has no right to throw upon his nature, 
or upon his ancestors near or remote, or upon 
his God, the blame which attaches to himself. 

If to the various definitions of man there 
should be added this : " The animal that 
shirks," it would perhaps be as distinctive 
and true a definition as any. The hint of 
this definition is in the story of Adam and 
Eve, and their endeavor to shift the blame of 
their disobedience upon each other. It char- 
acterizes the whole race, and is at once a 
symptom of moral sensitiveness and a proof 



36 MAN. 

of moral cowardice. When among the mul- 
titude of shirkers a man uplifts his head and 
says : " I did it, and I will take the conse- 
quences/' something hopeful appears. 

The view of man w r hich we have been pre- 
senting, while it accounts for much of the 
brutality in us, does not encourage or justify 
it. It explains its presence, and warns us 
that in indulging such brutality we are losing 
the slow gains of innumerable years. Other 
men have labored, and we have entered into 
the fruit of their labors in all the better char- 
acteristics of civilized and cultivated manhood. 

"Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

And we are the last. Whether we shall lead the 
way to a humanity in which enlightenment, 
self-control, and mutual devotedness shall be 
the leading qualities, or whether the torch of 
truth and freedom committed to our care 
shall be handed down with lessened light to 
those who come after us, is the critical question 
for this and every age. Hitherto the trend 
of man has been onward and upward ; though 
he has fallen, he has not been utterly cast 



MAN. 37 

down. The progress already made, as attested 
by the illustrations of modern research and 
discovery, is so immense that nothing seems 
extravagant in the hopes and expectations 
of the lover and prophet of humanity upon 
this earth. From the rude and monstrous 
creature, only differenced from his brute com- 
panions by superior cunning, to such a being 
as the best man we have known, — what a 
march and progress ! To feel as we have a 
right to feel, and as we have good reason to 
know, that we are near the head of this great 
procession of life which has been coursing 
over this earth for so many ages; to feel 
that, notwithstanding our faults and imper- 
fections, we are growing in the image of our 
Maker; that we are not His broken image, 
ruined and thrown away, and only capable 
of being picked up and mended, but children 
growing amidst the ignorance of youth into 
our Father's likeness, — surely such a view 
of man, his nature, origin, progress, calling, 
and probable destiny, as this has as much in- 
spiration and admonition in it as the old 
theory had, and far more evidence of truth. 



38 MAN. 

I believe it and preach it; and I would 
exhort others, as I enjoin it upon myself, to 
do something in their day and time to help 
on the upward journey of their race. Every 
success of the individual in gaining on the 
lower nature in him is so much help to his 
companions and successors, Here is a clear 
and real chance for good service. Do it! 
The consequences must be good for others as 
for yourself; and in whatever unseen and un- 
searchable mode of being you may be when 
this world's brief year is ended, you will not 
be weakened by the fact nor haunted by the 
memory that when you had a chance to be a 
man you chose to be a brute. Such a recol- 
lection, or the consequences of such a defect 
as that, no possible paradise could comfort. 
The soul admitted there would be exiled by 
its very entrance. 

Nay, let us leave all that to those who have 
it in their keeping ; and let us make the most 
of here and now, for the fulfilling of His pur- 
pose who made man to be, after many days, 
complete in His image. 



III. 

GOD. 



III. 

GOD. 

Creator. God created the heaven and the earth. — 

Gen. i. 1. 
Designer. He appointed the moon for seasons. — 

Psalm civ. 19. 
Spirit. God is Spirit. — John iv. 24. 

/^HILDREN ask deep questions, but they 
^■^ are often satisfied with shallow answers ; 
at least, they are quieted by such answers. 
u Who made me ? " is the question which every 
child asks sooner or later, and generally he 
receives with meekness the usual answer, — 
" God." Sometimes a hardy inquirer goes 
further, and innocently yet logically asks, 
"And who made God ? " If the child is not 
satisfied with the answer given to this ques- 
tion, he is compelled to be silent, for nobody 
can explain to him the mystery of a self- 
existent being. For many years he contents 
himself with the monosyllabic answer to his 
question about creation, and believes in " God 
the Father, Makek of heaven and earth." 



42 GOD. 

This is God the creator. 

By-and-by, as the youthful inquirer grows 
older and learns more of the world in which 
he lives; as he sees its nice adaptations, its 
wonderful fitness of organ to organism, and 
form to place, — he enriches his thought of 
God the maker with evidences of intelligent 
forethought and design, and thus he finds 
added proof of God in that "He appointed 
the moon for seasons." It is easy to believe 
the power which works on such a scale to be 
practically infinite, and the ultimate thought 
of the truth concerning God usually asks no 
further evidence of God's existence than the 
visible universe, viewed as His workmanship, 
affords. The child is thus brought to believe 
in God the designer. 

But the trained mind, taught to reason and 
to avoid inferences not justified by the facts, 
perceives that the proof of God's existence 
which quieted the child or convinced the 
immature youth, are not enough. It is not 
uncommon even for such a mind, unwilling 
to do the necessary thinking, and impatient 
of its labors, to drop for a time the belief in 



GOD. 43 

God ; and because the old proofs are disabled, 
to give up the belief which rested on them. 
But no man can get rid of the idea of God 
on those terms. He may see all the objec- 
tions that attach to the child's notion of a 
mechanical creator or maker, standing outside 
the world and making it as a child might 
make a snow-ball; he may feel the absurdity 
of many of the examples of design which are 
or have been instanced as proofs of an infinite 
designer, — but whatever he may say of these 
arguments for God's existence, he cannot 
rid himself of the idea of God. Because he 
distrusts the old proofs he does not lose 
the old idea. He has simply come to a time 
when he is ready and waiting for new proofs. 
Such proofs are to be found in a fresh 
reading of the facts of his own consciousness. 
Thus far he has sought for evidences of God 
in the world around him ; now he must look 
within. And looking within, he finds himself 
conscious of two sets of ideas, — one set rela- 
tive and changeable ; the other absolute and 
unchangeable. In the former are included 
what may be called the accidents of his being, 



44 GOD. 

— such as parentage, surroundings, individual 
life and character at any particular moment ; 
all which things can be imagined to be or to 
have been different from what they are. But 
in the latter set of ideas are included the ax- 
ioms of mathematics, the moral obligation im- 
plied in the word " ought/' the spiritual law 
of life by self-surrender, and I would add the 
consciousness of personal identity. None of 
these ideas can be conceived of as subject to 
change. One cannot imagine them other 
than they are. 

Thus in the very centre of man himself, 
fixed, ineradicable, and unchangeable, is the 
absolute truth, right, law, and self. And this 
is God. As Paul said so long ago on Mars Hill, 
" He is not far from every one of us, for in 
Him we live and move and have our being." 

If this is not proof of God, and more than 
proof, — knowledge of Him at first hand, — 
what is it? Let no man object that we are 
identifying God and man in thus finding God 
immanent in the constant elements of hu- 
manity. Two circles may have the same 
centre, while the circumference of one may 



GOD. 45 

infinitely transcend the circumference of the 
other. But we discard the figure as soon as 
we state it, for the man who is seeking to 
realize to his imagination or belief a quanti- 
tative God, or an infinite being in the terms of 
matter, undertakes the impossible. The very 
problem is a contradiction in terms, — an in- 
finite with dimensions being no true infinite. 
No ; it is in the thought of God as spirit, — the 
thought which Jesus expressed at the well of 
Samaria, — which can alone lead us into the 
reality of God. Infinite Spirit, with all the em- 
phasis upon the latter word, is the formula for 
Deity. And as we search for the inmost signi- 
ficance of spirit, — casting off, as baseless and 
unworthy, the notion which makes it either 
the ghost of matter or its negation, and fixing 
our whole thought upon spirit as quality, not 
quantity, — we shall come to a truer knowl- 
edge of God and a firmer faith in Him. 

Among the qualities of spirit as we find it 
in ourselves are thought, sensibility, and re- 
newal of life through life-giving. These are 
the constants of spirit; and they are as well 
known to us as anything can be. These 



46 GOD, 

qualities, which belong to us as spiritual 
beings, not only hear witness to an eternal 
spirit, — they are the eternal spirit in opera- 
tion. They are the eternal-^-ourselves mak- 
ing for truth, righteousness, and unselfishness. 
Say not in thine heart, " Who shall go up for 
us to heaven and bring God's word down to 
us, or who shall go over the sea for us and 
bring it unto us, for the word is very nigh 
thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." 

As Principal Caird has said in his " Philoso- 
phy of Religion," 2 a profound book to which I 
ought to acknowledge my indebtedness in this 
connection, — " The existence of a spirit in 
pure individuality, apart from other spirits, is 
not conceivable ; for a spiritual being is one 
that finds itself only in what is other than 
itself. It must lose itself, its isolated indi- 
viduality, in order truly to find or be itself. 
... As rational, spiritual beings, we have in 
us a nature which rests on the universal, infi- 
nite reason ; on a spiritual life which compre- 
hends and transcends all individual lives, and 

1 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, by John 
Caird. New York, Macmillan & Co., 1880, p. 199. 



GOD. 47 

apart from their relation to which they are 
themselves unintelligible." It may seem a tri- 
fling illustration, but I liken the relation exist- 
ing between the finite world and the infinite 
God to that familiar toy known among children 
as a "return-ball." The ball is connected with 
the hand of the player by an almost invisible 
elastic string, so that it can only be thrown 
the length of the extended string; it then 
returns to the hand that sent it forth. So 
the Almighty Hand never quite dismisses 
man, but throws him off, only to recover 
him again by the reaction of that divine 
quality in him, the spiritual principle of self- 
renunciation. 

Without further delving in the realm .of 
religious philosophy, let us take the mani- 
festations of the divine in human conscious- 
ness, and see what a basis of confidence and 
inspiration they give us. They are spiritual 
constants in a world of variation and change. 
For take the least spiritual of them, the 
axioms of mathematics. The absolute cer- 
tainty of mathematical truths and the incon- 
ceivability of their being other than they 



48 GOD. 

are, bring to the mind an immense support. 
And when such students as Galileo and Co- 
pernicus and Kepler and Leibnitz and New- 
ton find that the very principles which 
their minds have discovered to be true have 
governed the arrangement and ordering of 
the heaven and earth, mathematics rises 
from a mere school-task to a divine epiph- 
any. The devout astronomer feels and says 
that he is thinking God's thoughts after 
Him. I well remember how in my college 
days the face and figure of the eminent Pro- 
fessor of Mathematics at Cambridge were 
fairly transfigured, as he discoursed in un- 
premeditated phrase, but in long-pondered 
thought, upon the laws which govern alike 
the arrangement and ordering of the stars 
and the succession of the leaves upon the 
lily of the field. The laws of phyllotaxis 
and of cosmotaxis are one, as he showed us ; 
and the Infinite Spirit works by one math- 
ematical rule, whether He cares for the grass 
that is thrown into the oven or the sun 
whose heat maintains a whole system of de- 
pendent worlds. I do not wonder, in the 



GOD. 49 

presence of such truths as were revealed to 
our Professor's searching intelligence, — I do 
not wonder that he soberly thought such 
knowledge was a preparation for the king- 
dom of heaven, and congratulated the stu- 
dents who elected mathematics on the ad- 
vantages such knowledge might give them 
in the life to come. To know something 
which is always and everywhere true, — 
surely this is good standing-room. When 
other things fail us, — and amidst the ebb and 
flow of matter it seems as if nothing were 
fixed and constant, — I can imagine a man 
resting his bewildered mind on pure math- 
ematics, and taking religious comfort in the 
assurance that two times one are two, and 
three times one are three. If scholastic the- 
ology has shaken the faith of some in this 
latter statement, nevertheless there are other 
mathematical certainties still undisputed, and 
one may fall back on the multiplication 
table as a whole, with some assurance of 
faith. I say this in all soberness, conceiving 
as I do of these mathematical ideas as among 
the constants in man that reveal the Eternal. 

4 



50 GOD. 

The study of the exact sciences is therefore 
something more than a study of the inven- 
tions of man. It is a reading of the absolute 
mind. It is thinking the thoughts of God 
after Him. 

But there is a moral constant, a step be- 
yond the mathematical, in virtue of which 
the proof and presence of God are felt. It is 
the consciousness of duty, the sense of moral 
obligation. It is not necessary for this ar- 
gument that all men should in all ages of 
the world and in all stages of their develop- 
ment have one and the same standard of 
right. That standard varies with men's va- 
rying knowledge and development. But 
the presence in all men of a sense of indebt- 
edness to the right as it is revealed to them, 
is an invariable element in human nature. 
Analyze it as men may, derive it as they 
may, this constant in manhood remains 
constant. The proof of a man is the pres- 
ence in him of a sense of duty. It is as well 
the proof of God, for it proceeds from the 
indwelling spirit of the Eternal. Its con- 
stancy, its unchangeableness, proclaims its 



GOD. 51 

eternity. " Stern daughter of the voice of 
God/' Wordsworth calls it. But why not 
call it plain God ? I do not like to hear men 
called atheists when they stand fast by the 
moral sense, although they cannot so present 
the Deity to their mind as honestly to say 
they believe in Him. What else is that 
unchanging sense of the " ought " in them 
but the very God they deny, or hesitate to 
affirm? The man who keeps a conscience- 
room within him clean and habitable, is not 
without God. He is known of God, though 
he know not God. He is like a prisoner 
fed every day by some invisible hand, and 
not knowing whom to thank for his daily 
bread, until on some day of deliverance he 
sees and knows the benefactor of his life. 
Let no man lightly esteem the moral sense, 
or speak of it as indifferent to genuine re- 
ligion. Its presence in humanity is a veri- 
table footprint of the Creator. I do not 
wonder that in the chaos of rhetoric mas- 
querading as dogma, and symbol confusing 
thought and imagery, with which the reli- 
gious world has been filled, men fall back on 



52 GOD. 

conscience as the only divinity they are sure 
of, and accept the performance of duty as 
their only worship. Far better such a faith 
and practice as that, than a playing fast and 
loose with justice in the name of a misinter- 
preted revelation, and presenting the moral- 
ity of the skies as something other and better 
than the best morality of earth. To call that 
right in God which would be wrong in man, 
is to introduce confusion where God has es- 
tablished unity and order ; it invalidates 
the proof of Deity, which rests upon the 
permanence of the moral consciousness in 
man. And if by any scheme or device a 
way is shown in which men may render 
themselves acceptable to eternal right while 
in their lives or thoughts they accept the 
wrong, the very framework of the moral 
universe is undermined. Nay, if Words- 
worth is right, the visible skies themselves 
would fall if Duty were gainsaid ; for he 
sings to her, — 

11 Thou dost uphold the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
strong." 



god. 53 

The third constant in humanity which is a 
true witness of God, is that spiritual process 
by which man seeks a higher than any selfish 
good, freely sacrificing the lower self to an 
unselfish ideal. That man at his best does 
this, — that almost at his worst he has 
enough spirituality to discern this self-surren- 
der to a higher than self as the way of his 
true life, — may not be doubted by any pro- 
found student of human nature. And herein 
is the evidence that man is a spirit, open to 
inspiration by the spirit of God. And in the 
operation of that spirit of God we find the 
evidence of God's presence and reality. It 
is a quality of spirit to live for ends beyond 
itself. When we say " God is Spirit/' we im- 
ply a creation upon which the Eternal One 
may pour himself out, in accordance with the 
law of the spirit of life ; and when we find 
the tokens of such a law working in men 
both to will and to do, we come upon the 
working of the Divine Spirit himself. 

To quote again from Professor Caird: 
" That which raises man above the animal 
and provides for him an escape from the limits 



54 GOD. 

of his own individuality is that he can, and 
even in a sense that he must, identify himself 
with a consciousness that transcends all that 
is particular and relative. ... It is in thus 
uniting ourselves with the absolute thought, 
or self-consciousness, that we realize ourselves 
as rational and spiritual beings. . . . When 
in the language of religion we say, ' I live, 
yet not I, but Christ within me ; ' or, 
6 It is God that worketh in me to will and 
to do of His good pleasure/ — pious feeling 
is only giving expression in its own way 
to that which philosophy shows to be in 
strictest accordance with the principle of 
man's spiritual nature. ... It is the fulfil- 
ment and freedom of every spiritual being 
to become the organ of infinite and absolute 
reason." 

Thus the very recognition of a spirit in 
man acknowledges an over-spirit or inner- 
spirit, in whom and to whom it has its being; 
That spirit is God. 

The last constant in human consciousness 
which I have spoken of, is the sense of per- 
sonal identity. This seems to me as perma- 



GOD. 55 

nent as the principles of mathematics, morals, 
or spirit. It is one of the things which we 
cannot conceive of as interchangeable with 
anything else. And does not this bear wit- 
ness, by way of symbol at least, to a personal 
oneness in the Deity, inclusive and protec- 
tive of human personality? I do not, use 
the word " individuality," for that is too 
suggestive of limitation ; but " personal- 
ity " is a larger word, capable, if profoundly 
searched, of yielding some worthy expression 
of the Eternal, — an expression which may 
be needed to defend Deity from identifica- 
tion with any or all of His creatures. 

The value of such a search after the proofs 
or evidences of God as we have been pur- 
suing, lies in the firm ground it affords for 
our religious beliefs and trusts. As children 
we believe in God on hearsay, or for reasons 
which do not satisfy our mature intelligence. 
When we come to question the proofs, we 
are likely to lose for a time our faith in the 
reality behind them ; but at last, if we are 
patient and inquiring, we come to a know- 



56 GOD. 

ledge of certain constant, and by fair inference 
eternal, elements in our own nature, and thus 
recover God on the testimony of our own 
consciousness. 

In this way we come to something fixed 
and dependable, which no man can take away 
from us. For if we know anything, we know 
the things in ourselves which we have been 
considering, — the principles of mathematics, 
morals, spirit, personal identity. Other things 
we may be in doubt about, — even the things 
most common and familiar. For who can 
surely prophesy what finite and variable 
creatures will do or be at any particular stage 
of their lives ? What we superficially think 
we know best, we really know least well. I 
wish I knew my mortal destiny as surely as 
I know the immortal elements in my nature, 
and what they are sure to make for. I wish 
I were as sure of the individual men I am 
acquainted with, as I am of God. The in- 
dividual is always changing ; his only con- 
stancy seems to be constant change. But in 
the Being witnessed to by those constant fac- 
tors in us, — the principles of mathematics, 



GOD. 57 

morals, spirit, and personality, — I find a basis 
for clear knowledge and unwavering trust. 

" It fortifies my soul to know 
That though I perish, truth is so." 

The very questionings, doubts, and denials 
of men would have no meaning if there 
were no criterion of truth to which the 
doubter could make his appeal. There are 
" truths that wake to perish never." The 
truths of God and Duty are among them. 

11 And in the maddening maze of things, 
And tossed by storm and flood, 
To one fixed stake my spirit clings, — 
I know that God is good ! 

Not mine to look where cherubim 

And seraphs may not see, 
But nothing can be good in Him 

Which evil is in me" 

I know that the law of the spirit of life works 
ever by self -surrender ; and since God is 
infinite spirit, His being includes mine and 
stands sponsor for it. In His undivided unity, 
too, I see the surety of my own. 

Need I encumber this discourse upon God 
with a full list of the representative expres- 
sions concerning the Universal Spirit which 



58 GOD. 

have been current in religious circles from 
the beginning until now, some of which still 
serve as living and winning symbols of that 
reality which passeth show and is above 
every name? Surely no enlightened man 
to-day needs telling that all such represen- 
tations have no abiding force or permanent 
fitness as revelations of God. They are 
rather the masks of Deity than His revela- 
tion. The " Lord of Hosts/' the " God of 
Battles/' a " Man of War/' the "King of 
Kings/' even that sweetest and best word, 
the " Father," — all these familiar names are 
but faulty representatives of one or another 
phase of the Divine Providence as it appears 
in human history or biography. But we can 
well afford to part with all these symbols of 
God derived from human variableness, or at 
least to hold them merely as the language of 
emotion, if only we can put in their place 
those constants of human consciousness, — ex- 
act truth, moral integrity, spiritual dispersion, 
and personal identity, — in which we have 
been recognizing the presence of God in the 
human spirit. If we can shake off our de- 



GOD. 59 

pendence upon limited and local names and 
images of God, and learn, like Jacob when 
he found himself alone in the desert, that the 
wilderness itself into which we may have 
wandered in journeying from our childhood's 
home is none other than the house of God, 
then it may yet be well with us. 

For one, I feel thankful for all the experi- 
ences — doubt and struggle and discipline and 
correction and opposition and controversy and 
argument and communion and consideration 
and reconsideration — which have brought me 
at length to a realizing sense that the proof 
of the Eternal is not to be found in the phe- 
nomenal world or in that which is variable 
in man, but in those constants of which every 
man has the witness in himself, — the prin- 
ciples of mathematics, morals, spirit, and per- 
sonal identity. 

In the light of these principles let us live 
and plan and work and w r orship and die ; 
and so may the " very God of peace sanctify 
you wholly," and " make you perfect in every 
good work, to do His will, working in you that 
which is well-pleasing in His sight." 



IV. 
CHRIST. 



IV. 

CHRIST. 

Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto 
you by mighty works and wonders and signs, 
which God did by him in the midst of you. — 
Acts. ii. 22. 

Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of 
David according to the flesh ; who was declared to 
be the Son of God with power, according to the 
Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the 
dead. — Rom. i. 3, 4. 

And Jacob begqt Joseph the husband of Mary, of 
whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. — 
Matt. i. 16. 

PHUS closes what is called by the Evan- 
gelist Matthew the book of the genera- 
tion of Jesus Christ. This pedigree runs back 
to Abraham, taking in David, and is given for 
the purpose of showing that Jesus was liter- 
ally and truly a son of David and of the seed 
of Abraham. You see, of course, that it would 
be useless for such a purpose unless Joseph 
be taken as the father of Jesus. And yet no 



64 CHRIST. 



sooner is this family-tree given, with its deri- 
vation of Jesus from David through Joseph 
the husband of Mary, than this writer pro- 
ceeds to show that Jesus was not the son 
of Joseph. A like inconsistency is found in 
the Gospel of Luke, where Joseph's ances- 
try is given at full length, as if it had an 
important bearing upon the status of Jesus 
as a son of David ; and yet Joseph is said 
not to be Jesus' father. One probable ex- 
planation of these discrepancies — perhaps 
the most probable explanation — is to say 
that the Gospels are compositions made up of 
various traditions, and that the two traditions 
concerning Jesus' parentage are thus given 
in the same writing. When historic docu- 
ments seem not to agree with themselves, 
either some way must be found of har- 
monizing them, or there must be allowed to 
the reader the liberty of taking his choice 
between the conflicting testimonies. 

I should despair of reconciling such seem- 
ing contradictions as Matthew and Luke 
present, if it did not seem permissible to me 
to say that the genealogy of Jesus through 



CHRIST. 65 



Joseph to David and Abraham is the true 
account of Jesus' bodily extraction, while 
the immediate derivation of Jesus from God 
the Father is the story of his spiritual 
origin told in physical terms. I admit that 
this is not what Matthew and Luke both 
purport to give in their explicit narratives. 
But it is said that Scripture must be inter- 
preted by Scripture, and I find the sugges- 
tion and justification of this explanation in 
that verse of Paul given in the first chap- 
ter of Komans, where it is said that Jesus 
" was born of the seed of David according to 
the flesh/' and " was declared to be the Son 
of God, . . . according to the Spirit of Holi- 
ness." The son of God in spirit; the son of 
Abraham and David and Joseph and Mary 
in body, — such, I believe, was Jesus. Or 
to take Peter's clear statement: "Jesus of 
Nazareth, a man approved of God unto 
you, by mighty works and wonders and 
signs, which God did by him." 

God doing mighty works in and through 
man, — that is the apostolic presentation of 
Jesus. I accept it; I believe it. The in- 

5 



66 CHRIST. 



quiry we have been making together con- 
cerning man and God, leads us logically to 
this interpretation of Christ. We found our 
clearest testimony concerning God in the wit- 
ness of our own consciousness to law, right, 
spirit, and personal identity. These, we said, 
were not so much proofs of God as God 
himself present and active in the mind, con- 
science, spirit, and personality of man. What 
more natural, therefore, than a personality 
like that of Jesus, in which the Divine 
thought and life should course unbrokenly? 
Not least human but most human is he 
in whom the Divine thus pours itself forth 
uninterruptedly. The "Son of God," we say, 
following the Evangelical phrase about Jesus ; 
but I have no objection to saying "God" 
himself, if only those who so teach concern- 
ing Jesus will extend their conception of the 
divine working so as to include all its agents 
and agencies. That prophetic passage, Isaiah 
vii. 14, concerning the "young woman" that 
should bear a son and call his name Emman- 
uel, " God with us," was certainly applied 
in the first place to an historical personage 



CHRIST. 67 



who lived during the Syro-Israelitish invasion 
(734 b. c). There is no objection to its appli- 
cation to Jesus, if only it is known and 
admitted that it had an earlier fulfilment. 
" The spiritual significance of the name, the 
spiritual presence of God with men, w r as real- 
ized more and more perfectly as Israel grew 
in knowledge, and at last most perfectly in 
Jesus of Nazareth, who most truly embodied 
the Divine and became the Redeemer of 
men." 1 

Thus we see that the inclusive meaning of 
Emmanuel, " God with us," w^as its earlier 
meaning; and w r e are not departing from 
Scripture, but abiding by it, in thus apply- 
ing the passage. Perhaps it is for this end 
that the Christian world has been suffered 
by Providence to hold so long and so tena- 
ciously to the dogma of the Deity of Christ. 
It was not wrong, it has not been wrong, 
in believing that the mighty works and 
saving influences of Jesus were done in him 
by God. , Even as Peter said, while in the 
same sentence he called Jesus " a man," — 

1 Toy's Quotations in New Testament. 



68 CHRIST. 



" Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of 
God." That was Peter's phrase, and it is 
ours. And when he goes on to praise Jesus' 
wonderful works as done by God, we find 
here the perfect expression of our own be- 
lief. Yes, God worked in and by Jesus. But 
this no more makes Jesus to be God than 
I make you me, if I inspire and empower 
you to do my will. Or if there must be 
no comparison made between the Divine in- 
fluence upon man and man's lesser influence 
on his fellow, then let me say that God do- 
ing mighty works by Jesus is the same in 
kind as God doing mighty works in any 
other man. There is immense difference in 
degree, but it is all one in kind. The hu- 
man invites and entertains the Divine, re- 
sponds to it, is fellow-worker with it, and 
finds its life by losing it according to the 
one law of spiritual being. 

You may have felt when we were studying 
man together that the modern view of his 
derivation, which I espoused, somewhat com- 
promised man by making him too near akin 
to the lower animals. The more ancient view 



CHRIST. 69 



compromises him still more, by making him 
hopelessly corrupt. But letting that discussion 
pass, the point to which I would call attention 
is this, — we did not really get our full testi- 
mony concerning man until we began our 
search for God. Then, in the witness within 
him we found the real dignity of man to con- 
sist in the Divine indwelling. Theologians of 
the old school object to the teaching of man's 
physical extraction from other and less highly 
organized creatures, because, as they say, it 
drags down the body in which " our Lord " 
himself lived while on earth. But God him- 
self is not likely to be compromised by any 
of his works, certainly not by those which 
praise him, because they are so " fearfully and 
wonderfully made." Moreover, it is not the 
house but its inmate which makes the place 
holy or honorable. I would not undertake 
to say where or when or how the unselfish 
spiritual quality in human life begins. I 
cannot draw the line or run the stream of 
separation which makes body and spirit rivals 
in the heart of man. Just when and where 
the everlasting gates lift up their heads, and 



70 CHRIST. 

the King of Glory comes into human life, 
I may not know. But it argues human worth 
and Divine nearness that the word of God is 
so near man, even in his mouth. And when 
Jesus comes to his own, " a man approved of 
God/' — son of David as to his body, son of 
God in spirit, — it seems to me that the secret 
of his sorrow and the reason of his failure, or 
long-deferred success, were that " his own 
received him not." 

The very purpose of the incarnation in 
Jesus is lost, unless that incarnation is ac- 
cepted as a type and instance of the normal 
and perfected human. 

In the hope of getting closer to the meaning 
of the Christ idea, I have made a fresh study 
of the messianic expectations of the time in 
which Jesus appeared. They varied according 
to the character and disposition of those who 
held them. But one feature is common to 
them all ; namely, the Messiah " would re- 
store again the kingdom to Israel." 

So fixed was this thought even in the minds 
of the most spiritual believers, that Jesus' 
disciples are reported as eagerly asking him 



CHRIST. 71 



whether the scene of his predicted second 
advent would be the occasion of Israel's 
recovered independence. The messiah was 
heralded by various titles, — " the Messiah/' 
the " Anointed of the Lord;" that is, the 
king, the son or successor of David. Some- 
times he is simply designated as "he that 
should come." Concerning his nature, there 
were two schools, — one teaching that the 
messiah would be a man, the offspring of 
David, " that prophet that should come into 
the world ; " the other maintaining that the 
messiah would be a superhuman being, best 
known by the title " Son of God." In the 
presence of these opposing views, it is inter- 
esting to notice which view Jesus himself 
favored. Surely it is not without significance 
that we find him preferring the title " Son 
of man." A messianic title truly, like the 
others, and claiming as fully as they claim 
the office that goes with the name ; but as 
the historian of " Apostolic Theology " * de- 
clares: "In saying, Believe in me, take the 
hand which I stretch to you, cast your bur- 

1 E. Reuss, vol. i. p. 230. 



72 CHRIST. 



den upon me ; in promising pardon of sins 
to those who should trust in him and follow 
him, — he implicitly presents himself as the 
normal and model man, as the ideal of human- 
ity. . . . Nor should we ever lose sight of the 
fact that in Hebrew the ' son ' means the 
' quality.' ' Son of man ' would thus mean 
man in his most distinctive quality." 

Even so, that other messianic title, " Son of 
God," might fairly be claimed as indicating 
God in His proper quality (so to speak). And 
why not ? Where is the contradiction, when 
you have once grasped the great truth that 
as spirits, God and man have one way of life ; 
namely, the way of saving life by losing it, — 
the way of endless outpouring and recovery ? 
As one of our own teachers has said, " We be- 
lieve in the divinity of man and the humanity 
of God." In the light of this discovery there is 
no longer any room for the discussion whether 
Jesus was the one or the other. If he was 
either, he was both. 

Ah, well! it is ever the fate of great 
truths to be encrusted with great errors. A 
nation gets convinced that the golden age 



CHRIST, 73 



is in the future, that creation is progressive, 
that humanity is mounting upward, not run- 
ning down : a veritable stem-truth this, from 
which increase of bud and blossom and fruit- 
age may be hoped. But what does the 
chosen nation do with its great thought ? It 
makes a private possession of it, and warns 
off humanity at large from infringing the 
Jewish patent. 

To Christendom is given the sublime truth 
that humanity is sacred with the divine in- 
dwelling, and spiritual man is shown his nor- 
mal type in Jesus. And what does Christen- 
dom do with its great revelation? It imitates 
the greed of Judaism on a larger scale. 

What is the use of giving truth to men 
who will only use it to show off their errors ? 
Well, something of its form survives dimly out- 
lined amidst those very errors. And when 
in time or times — for lies die hard — the 
robe of falsehood wears away, the beautiful 
truth gleams forth like an unveiled statue. 
What if the second coming of Christ should 
be no other than this dissolution of the robe 
of error in which we have concealed him, and 



74 CHRIST. 

the revelation that he has never left us, but 
been with us " always, even unto the end of 
the world " ! 

With me the truth concerning Jesus has 
come to this (and I have only a curious, schol- 
arly, or professional interest in any other 
discussion about him), — all is told to me 
in this, — that Jesus has revealed the truth 
that the way of spiritual life is unselfish love, 
and that it is a way in which men can walk, 
God helping them. That is all. And it 
is all. 

If the Bible chemists wish to experiment 
with their pearl of great price, let them. 
They may learn that pearls are soluble in 
acetic acid ; but in learning it they lose their 
pearl. Why should you or I, glad in the 
beauty and worth of the great principle that 
" Love is lord of life and death," and grateful 
for its consummate working in Jesus Christ, 
trouble ourselves or suffer others to trouble 
us with mysteries of three in one or one in 
three, or with schemes that savor more of 
earthly courts than of heavenly counsels? 

" He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and 



CHRIST. 75 



he that loseth his life for my sake shall find 
it." That way of the spirit, as Jesus taught 
and lived it, is to me the sum and substance 
of the gospel. It is one with the eternal 
way of spirit, — the spirit's law unto itself. 
How do I know it ? Because it says so when 
I listen to its voice within. The character 
and life of Jesus are in perfect accord with 
this principle. Therefore I trust him, believe 
in him, would follow him, and feel sure 
that only in that way is there peace for the 
spiritual element in man. 

Unto what shall I liken the life of the 
spirit, one in all spiritual beings ? It is like 
the down-pouring and out-giving of a river, 
which does not ask " Whence shall I be filled 
again ? " but finds its life in giving all it has. 
And all the while the very abandon of its 
giving is filling the great sea with the re- 
sources of its own renewal. 

There is such a river in the far East which 
was called Jordan, " the Descender," so rapid 
and eager was its current ; and all its haste 
seemed fruitless, for it fell at last into the 
Sea of Death. But one day long ago Jesus of 



76 CHRIST. 



Nazareth was baptized in its waters, and ever 
since that day the river has been as the river 
of the water of life ; and the Spirit descending 
there as a dove descends, fluttered downward 
from the sky, and greeted Jesus as " the be- 
loved Son" in whom the Father was well 
pleased. I believe that voice. It is the voice 
of the Spirit in the heart of man. " This 
is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased. Follow him!" 



V. 
THE SPIRIT. 



V. 

THE SPIRIT. 

The Just for the Unjust. — 1 Peter iii. 18. 

HPHIS is the way of the Spirit always. It 
is no exceptional device or scheme made 
visible and active in Jesus, and in him alone. 
Most active in him, most visible in him, 
among all men, certainly. And if atone- 
ment were preached through the sufferings 
of the innocent as the universal way of 
spiritual redemption, there would be no 
opposition to it. Such suffering and its re- 
deeming influence upon the sinful is the 
guiding motive, the leitmotif of the human 
opera. We meet it everywhere. It is the 
penalty of all true love to suffer in all that 
is faulty in its beloved. Such suffering 
is not in the nature of purposed sacrifice, 
though it may lead to that. It is the bitter 
with the sweet which all things human seem 
to need. Moreover, it is of the very nature 



80 THE SPIRIT. 



of love that it should feel every lapse in its 
beloved, even more than the beloved himself 
may feel it. For our ideals of ourselves are 
not generally so clearly defined and ardently 
affected as are our ideals of those whom 
we most love ; their defect is often our 
despair, when an equal defect in ourselves 
would be unobserved or lightly endured. 
The way of the transgressor is hard ; but it 
is harder for those who love him. We can- 
not make it otherwise if we would ; for 
love that did not suffer in the faults of its 
beloved, would not be love. Sometimes these 
agonies of sympathy or pity become so pa- 
thetic that they melt the heart of him who 
sees them; and if anything can ever reach 
and break the obdurate heart of wilful sin, 
it is this unmerited suffering of love for its 
beloved. The presentation of this principle 
in the crucified Jesus is the converting se- 
cret of Christianity ; his body broken on the 
cross, gives sin that heart-ache which begins 
its cure. Too much cannot be made of this 
saving principle or of its consummate symbol 
and embodiment, — the cross of Christ. But 



THE SPIRIT. 81 



I believe the universality of the principle has 
often been lost sight of in adoring prostration 
before its highest exposition in Jesus; and 
I also 'believe that that sublime instance of 
love's penalty, the cross of Christ, has been 
misinterpreted by popular theology. The 
emphasis which that theology has laid 
upon the preposition in that grand phrase, 
"the just for the unjust," and the notion 
thereby engendered that Jesus suffered and 
died for sinners, in the sense of " in their 
place," has emptied the doctrine of truth and 
efficacy. Of truth, for it surely is not true 
that Jesus died in place of sinners, else why 
do sinners die ? Of efficacy, for the whole 
potency of the cross of Christ lies in its 
illustration of the way of love, — not con- 
sciously sacrificing itself for the satisfaction 
of some unseen power, either God or Devil, 
but naturally and necessarily suffering the 
consequences of caring so much for the 
sinner that it could not leave him in his sin 
without protest, entreaty, and prostration 
even unto the death of the cross. 

The prophetic imagery of the Old Testa- 

6 



82 THE SPIRIT. 



ment, on which the purely vicarious doctrine 
of a later Christendom plants itself, is demon- 
strably more in accord with the thought we 
are presenting than with any substitutional 
theory. Such passages as the early verses of 
the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah refer primarily 
to Israel as a nation, and to that portion of it 
which bore the stripes and wounding of the 
Babylonish captivity. On them the Lord had 
laid the iniquity of all their brethren. This 
does not interfere with the use that is made 
of it by New Testament writers as applying 
pre-eminently to Jesus, if only care be taken 
not to part with the true conception of the 
prophecy. This was the simple notion, — that 
in the providence of God a part suffered on 
account of the sins of the whole. No instance 
of such suffering, even though it be the su- 
preme instance of the cross of Christ, should 
be made to obscure or annul the law or way 
of which it is an example and illustration ; 
and to me the cross of Christ gains in 
influence and authority when it is thus 
seen to be the attestation of love's inevi- 
table penalty, not a device for escaping sin's 



THE SPIRIT 83 



inevitable woe. It is the vice of the sacri- 
ficial and vicarious theology that it has made 
a wilful requirement out of a divine neces- 
sity, turning the penalty of love into a forced 
payment to justice. But a principle never 
dies. What is according to Nature shares 
her vitality. The truth lives under all the 
disguises which men put upon it. And this 
elemental fact that love suffers for every fault 
in its beloved, is as permanent as the nature 
in which it is the most beautiful trait. 

It is not surprising that a fact so ineradi- 
cable and so profound should be misinter- 
preted. The immense system of sacrifice is 
based upon a misreading of the severity of 
love. Not by sacrifice, — as when Abraham 
mistakenly sought to satisfy God wdth the of- 
fering of his son ; or Jephthah, by the killing 
of his daughter, — but by freely accepting and 
paying love's penalty ; namely, that burden of 
sorrow that weighs on the heart when looking 
for perfection in its idealized object, it finds 
there both defect and sin. I see and agree 
that there is in the thought of Paul and of 
John an inheritance of the sacrificial idea. 



84 THE SPIRIT. 



It would be unnatural if there were not. It 
was natural and right that they should rep- 
resent the gospel in the highest religious 
terms with which they were familiar. "The 
lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of 
the world " is one of those heirlooms of a 
sacrificial religion In late Hebrew and early 
Christian thought, " bearing our sorrows" and 
" bearing our sins " were identical terms. 
The proof of it is in the fact that both John 
and Peter follow the Septuagint in substitut- 
ing the word " sin " for " suffering" in their 
quotation from Isaiah. But as Professor Toy 
in his candid and able exposition of this and 
kindred passages says: "Matthew changed 
the idea intended by the prophet when he 
represented Jesus as taking man's diseases 
and infirmities upon himself. If we could 
understand the evangelist/' continues this 
interpreter, " to say merely that Jesus was 
burdened in soul by the sorrows of men, this 
would be not exactly the sense of the prophet, 
but a not unnatural extension of his thought." l 

1 See Toy's Quotations from Old Testament in New 
Testament. 



THE SPIRIT. 85 



It is that extension which we in this discourse 
would make. 

In the two explanations of Holbein's famous 
Madonna, these two views are perfectly con- 
trasted. The picture was painted in gratitude 
for the restoration of a sick child. Both the 
Christ-child and the sick child appear in the 
picture. But the child in Mary's arms is the 
one who seems ill, while the child at her feet 
is overflowing with health. What is meant 
by the artist ? One interpreter says, " The 
holy mother has put down her own child to 
take the sick child in her healing embrace." 
Another interpreter says, " No ! the Christ- 
child is the one in Mary's arms ; and the 
reason he looks ill and pining is because he 
has taken the disease of the healed child, and 
is bearing it in his own person." 

According as you accept one or the other 
interpretation of this picture as your chosen 
way of thinking, you ally yourself with the 
substitutional and contra-natural, or the 
natural and sympathetic reading of the cross 
of Christ. To my mind and heart and soul 
there is no comparison, in spiritual truth and 



86 THE SPIRIT. 



worth, between the latter and the former. 
The one offends my sense of the right, the 
just, and the merciful; the other is one 
with the spirit of the universe, the heart of 
love in the rough-seeming burr of our 
earthly environment. We find this sad but 
noble experience of love's penalty at the 
core of the best art as well as the truest 
religion. In Wagner's Tannhauser, what is 
the spiritual motif ? Its musical motif the 
musicians will show you. But what is its 
spiritual motif ? The very one we have been 
searching, — the penalty of love and its reward 
in the redemption of its beloved. The guilty 
Tannhauser is saved by the love of heilige 
Elizabeth; and if love's last penalty, even 
death, had to be paid for the rescue, it was 
not refused. She who pleaded with the sin* 
ner on earth, pleaded with God for him in 
heaven, and her prayer unto the God of her 
life was answered. The same sublime theme 
runs through that remarkable story, "A 
Brother to Dragons," where a noble and 
saintly woman throws herself on death, that 
she may save and redeem a wayward man 



THE SPIRIT. 87 



embittered by injury and lost by rash and 
proud despair. 

What does it mean, this presence and in- 
fluence in art and life of one predominating 
motif ? It means that there is an immortal 
principle in spiritual nature, dimly perceived, 
vaguely recognized, crudely expressed by 
early and ignorant ages, and not always 
rightly apprehended in later times and among 
nominal Christians, — a universal principle of 
spiritual life, according to which the delicate, 
sensitive, pure, unselfish, innocent, and loving 
suffer because of the gross, selfish, obstinate, 
and ugly elements in those they love. The 
innocent do not suffer for the sinful, in the 
sense of " in their place ; " for sooner or 
later, the suffering of wrong-doing reaches 
the wrong-doer. But the innocent suffer 
because of the wrong-doing of those they 
love. It is not vicarious suffering, — it is 
premonitory, like the rosy flush far up in the 
west before the sun in the east has fairly 
risen upon his day's travel across the earth ; 
it is the innocence of the skies ashamed 
beforehand of what the all-seeing sun must 



88 THE SPIRIT. 



see. I never heard love complain of its 
penalty. It takes its unmerited suffering as 
part of • the burden which belongs to it. 
Christians weep over the sorrows of Christ, 
but he wept only for the sins of Jerusalem 
and the sorrows of Bethany. I find nowhere 
in his self-communing or public utterance 
the note of lamentation over his own woes. 
In love's redeeming work he is willing to 
endure love's depressing sorrows. When I 
can rid my mind of the sacrificial, govern- 
mental, vicarious gloss which arrested theol- 
ogy has put upon them, I like to read those 
sentences from the younger Isaiah, and find in 
them the picture of redemption by love. 

" Surely, he hath borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows." Yes, that is the w r ay of 
love, — more tender of us than of himself. 

"He was wounded for our transgressions, 
he was bruised for our iniquities." Yes, his 
innocence found its only cause of suffering in 
our sins. 

" The chastisement of our peace was upon 
him, and with his stripes we are healed." Yes, 
because every wound in his hands and side 



THE SPIRIT 89 



appeals to heaven from our ingratitude, and 
shames us to contrition. 

" The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of 
us all." Even so, long-suffering love ! 

When we muse upon it, what else is crea- 
tion but the infinite denying itself for the 
finite, and bearing by love's secret the sins of 
the world, — God for man, the just for the 
unjust. True, it is the necessity and happiness 
of spirit to pour itself out for that which is 
other than itself. So sweet and sound is the 
heart of all things unseen and spiritual. The 
noblest theme of art and of life is the theme 
of creation, — love paying the penalty of 
loving by suffering with the misfortunes of 
its beloved. 

But not in vain is all this unmerited suffer- 
ing and unlimited love. The impartial sun 
and rain have their reward at last. If any- 
thing can break down impenitence and restore 
the banished, it is the cross of Christ, — the 
eternal principle by which the worlds were 
made, by which humanity is governed, and 
by which the Infinite " devises means that his 
banished be not expelled from Him." For 



90 THE SPIRIT. 



nothing but unselfish love can break the 
heart of selfish sin. Love has many ways, 
but one spirit ; and always there is this in- 
cident in its working, — the carrying of the 
cross. 

Not in vain, and not by the will of man, 
has the cross become the symbol of the world's 
dearest hope and highest way. If I could 
always hear it preached as Nature preaches 
it in every denial of some wonted form for 
something other, every cradle on the grave of 
something that has gone before, every mani- 
festation of force a transformation of some 
other force ; or if I could hear it preached 
as Spirit preaches it, promoting life by surren- 
dering its own repose, or saving its ow r n life 
by losing it ; if I could hear it preached as 
Jesus, unexplained by mediaeval theology, 
preached it, or better yet as he manifested it, 
love bearing love's penalty along the dusty 
way to Calvary, — then I would glory in the 
cross of Christ as the one way of life and love 
and Spirit, — God. 

Why can we not seek and find this grand 
and common, albeit mysterious, meaning in 



THE SPIRIT. 91 



the Christian symbol and dotrine of the cross 
of Christ, — love's invariable penalty ? 

Then there would stream out from it all 
that reconciliation with the hard ways of our 
mortal lot which comes from a sense of high 
companionship in our necessary sorrows. We 
should feel that our lesser woes are one with 
his who died for us, not that we might escape 
death, but that we might die fearlessly and 
hopefully. We should feel that we are only 
paying love's penalty, and that it is richly 
worth its cost, when we are agonizing over 
some fatal gap between the idol of our hearts 
and our ideal for him. That way lie prayer 
and effort and wrestling and entreaty, and the 
ministry of all that is best in us, for the bet- 
tering of our child, our friend, our love. We 
should know what that fine singer, Sir John 
Bowring, meant in the hymn, — 

"In the cross of Christ I glory," — 

because we should feel that that cross as the 
expression of immortal love, bearing the con- 
sequences of its own goodness in an evil time, 
was the most glorious thing this world can see. 



92 THE SPIRIT. 



"When the woes of life o'ertake us," we 
should feel, like Paul, that we were knowing 
the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, and that 
it would lead us to the power of his resurrec- 
tion. Even in our joys we should find the 
cross adding " new lustre to the day," be- 
cause that cross would no longer be to us the 
altar on which a human sacrifice hung bleed- 
ing, by whose blood we are cleansed after the 
manner of ancient sacrifices ; but it would be 
the dearest and clearest showing of the love 
wherewith God loved us while we were yet 
sinners, — Christ's holiness revealing man's 
blessedness. "Bane and blessing, pain and 
pleasure," would feel the sanctifying touch 
of every ray reflected from the cross of him 
who died to self that he and we might live 
to God. 

The measureless peace of a heart emptied 
of self-seeking, the endless joys of a soul filled 
with longings after God, would come to us 
as we looked unto him "who is our peace. " 
None shall out-sing us in songs of gratitude 
or ascriptions of praise in view of the cross of 
Christ, if only we may see there the vindica- 



THE SPIRIT. 93 



tion and illustration of that universal way of 
the Spirit, which pours itself forth for the 
life of the world, and whose witnesses have 
gone out to all the earth. Thus viewed in 
its eternal meaning, how the cross of Christ 
opens all rooms in the realm of spirit, and 
even gives to the shifting forms of Nature a 
" light that never was on sea or land." It 
is the key of the universe. It " sets before 
us an open door" into the house of God, 
the dwelling-place of the Most High. For 
it reveals God as love, bearing love's pen- 
alty, and pouring itself out endlessly for 
its beloved. 



" Immortal love, forever full, 
Forever flowing free ; 

Forever shared, forever whole, 
A never-ebbing sea." 



VI. 

HELL. 



VI. 

HELL. 

Fear hath torment. But perfect love casteth out fear. 
1 John iv. 18. 

T T ELL is sin overtaken by its conse- 
A A quences. Interpreted by the imagi- 
nation, its scene in time is the Judgment 
Day ; in space, the underworld ; in symbol, 
Gehenna, or the Yale of Hinnom near Jeru- 
salem, where the garbage of the city was 
burned in a continual fire ; in apocalyptic 
imagery, probably the crater of the volcano 
of Thera in the Mediterranean Sea. In- 
terpreted by fact, hell is anywhere where 
sin is overtaken by its consequences. 

For if our definition is correct, hell cannot 
be fixed to any locality or timed by any day, 
or identified with any physical process, or 
fully expressed by any image or symbol. 



98 HELL. K 

If it is sin overtaken by its consequences, — 
wherever and whenever this occurs, there 
and then is hell. 

I saw in a recent issue of the " New York 
Tribune " an illustrated article headed " Tin- 
types. No. VIII." Among the illustrations 
was a Bowery night-scene. It was arranged 
as Dor6 used to depict the processions of evil 
spirits in his illustrations of Dante's In- 
ferno. Only a small section of the sidewalk 
crowd could be given, but it was enough. 
It perfectly represented the whole company; 
and one only needed to stretch the proces- 
sion out in a sinuous line through space, to 
see that the mean tin-type of a street-scene 
in New York was one with Dore's infernal 
imagery. Since you cannot see the picture, 
let me give a portion of the text that ac- 
companied it: — 

"In some of the faces that passed the observer, he 
saw only a careless sensuality, brightened by the flush 
of excitement. Others, somewhat older, were full of 
brazen coarseness ; and others, older still, bore that 
pitiful look of hopeless regret, quickly changing to 
one that says as plainly as can be that the time for 
thinking and caring has gone. Upon many was 



HELL. 99 

stamped the brand of inborn infamy, their only in- 
heritance. Some hunted souls went by, their manner 
jaded and hopeless, their steps nervous and irresolute, 
and their eyes scanning the street before them, never 
resting, never closed. . . . Want had marked most 
of them with unmistakable lines, and often crossing 
these were others telling that they knew no better 
than they did." 

Then the article pursues some of these 
fugitive souls into their dens, and makes 
the reader shudder with their brutality and 
insensibility. To my mind, this tin-type of 
one phase of life in a great modern city is 
more demonstrative of hell than ancient 
texts and their modern illustrations. There 
is no chance for argument, pro or con, in 
this present scene of sin overtaken by its 
consequences. It is. It is here. It is 
to-day. While I speak to you, this awful 
thread of human want and agony and des- 
peration and deviltry is spinning out and 
on, as the great world-wheel turns round 
and round. To-morrow morning, some of 
them will be dead ; some sunk in the stupor 
of alcoholic reaction or of spent passion ; 
some arrested and imprisoned ; some in hid- 



100 HELL. 

ing for the day, only coming forth after 
their prey at night like wild beasts; some 
working at wages that invite starvation or 
compel crime ; some of them penitent and 
prayerful ; more of them desperate and 
cursing; all miserable. "My Lord, what 
a morning ! " So goes the old plantation 
song of the Day of Judgment. So goes 
the matin-song of to-morrow, if we had ears 
to hear. 

" What shall we put in the place of the 
Orthodox doctrine of hell, — a place of eter- 
nal torment for the impenitent dead ? " I 
once asked a sensible layman of the Liberal 
church. " Preach the present torment of 
the impenitent living," he made answer. 
And truly, if one could see it and tell it as 
it is, that w r ould be enough to make sin 
hateful and fearful. I go to the hospital, 
where excess has sent its victims ; and the 
revelation of those revenges which Nature 
has in store for them who disobey her is as 
intimidating as a sea of burning sulphur. 
Some are there who are paying the penalty 
of ancestral transgression. " The fathers have 



HELL. 101 

eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth 
are set on edge." 

When in place of crazing the imagina- 
tion with visions of ingenious torment in 
some future state, I walk the rounds of 
these wards of pain and weakness and mor- 
tal agony, and reflect that nearly all of it 
is due to sins of wilfulness or blameful ig- 
norance in one or another generation, I do 
not need any tardy demonstration of a future 
hell to turn me against the evil that lies 
tortured here. Or when I visit the jails or 
mines, where criminals are confined, and see 
the shameless hardness or mean subservi- 
ency or hang-dog deprecation or sturdy 
falsehood or foolish bravado which prevail 
there, I do not need to draw upon Dante's 
Inferno, or Dore's picture gallery of Hell, or 
the Apocalypse, or the Westminster con- 
fession, for my belief in retribution. It is 
here and now. These spirits in prison con- 
fess it. Nay, whither shall I flee from its pres- 
ence? For as Swedenborg says: ".Whether 
you say evil or hell, it amounts to the 
same thing." For " evil is so combined with 



102 HELL. 

its punishment that to separate them is im- 
possible." 

" In general/' says this hardy seer of the 
invisible world, " all the inhabitants of hell 
are governed by their fears. It is chiefly 
by fears of punishments that they are de- 
terred from committing evils." Why should 
we not accept that judgment and extend its 
application, including within its terms all 
those who in the body are only amenable to 
fear ? The men who are only deterred from 
sin by fear of punishment are already in the 
bondage of death. To live in fear of hell is 
to be in hell already. The poet Cowper, 
believing himself lost, needed to die to find 
himself saved. His hell was here. Who 
was that knight who had for his motto, " I 
fear nothing but to do wrong " ? " The 
blessing of knowledge is that it delivers 
men from fear," said Aristotle. You have 
heard the story of the young man who re- 
solved to ally himself with the strongest 
leader he could find, and who joined the 
army of a great king. By-and-by, he found 
that his king feared another king who was 



HELL. 103 

stronger than himself; so the young man 
joined the side of the stronger king. By- 
and-by, he found that this king had a su- 
perstitious fear of the Evil One ; so the 
young man went over to the stronger ene- 
my. But by-and-by he found that the Evil 
One was afraid of Christ; and so the young 
man joined the party of Christ, and there- 
after feared no man. Salvation is deliver- 
ance from the fear of any adversary ; dam- 
nation is subjection to fear. They who live 
in fear, whether in this life or in any other, 
live under condemnation, and their life is a 
present hell. 

How can we take the great and just prin- 
ciple of retribution and save it from the 
extravagance of endless torment on the one 
side, and from the falsehood of paltry evasion 
on the other ? 

It is easy to take the strong rhetoric of 
the New Testament concerning future pun- 
ishment and the merciless dogma into which 
it has been hardened by a later theology, and 
show that in many instances where the word 
" hell " is found in the common version, either 



104 HELL. 

the grave or the place of departed spirits, 
whether good or bad, is intended. The new 
version prefers " haides " in some passages, 
and offers " gehenna " in the marginal notes 
in connection with others ; while in the Old 
Testament the word "shed," the Hebrew 
name of the abode of the dead (irrespective 
of their merits), is always used. The doctrine 
of eternal punishment for sins is much more 
surely taught by heathen scriptures than by 
either the Jewish or Christian. The Persian 
Zendavesta, with its pronounced dualism, has 
vivid and lively pictures of Ahriman and his 
evil abode. 1 The Buddhist Sutta Nipata ri- 
vals the most prodigal of modern exponents 
of an endless hell. Indeed it has not less 
than eight separate hells, each one twenty- 
fold larger than its predecessor. The favorite 
Christian image of the mountain of sand, 
from which a bird removes a grain every 

1 They rush, they run away with shouts, the wicked, 
evil-doing Dsevas ; they run away casting the evil eye, the 
wicked, evil-doing Dsevas. They run away, they rush away, 
into the depths of the dark, horrid world of hell. Ashem 
vohu, — Holiness is the best of all good. — Fargard, xix. 
45, 141. 



HELL, 105 

year and yet fails to exhaust eternity though 
the whole mountain is removed, is rivalled 
by the Kosala load of sesamum seed, from 
which a man every one hundred years took 
one seed at a time ; and yet that Kosala load 
would sooner by this means dwindle away 
and be used up than one Abbuda hell. 

But a Nirrabuda hell is equal to twenty 
Abbuda hells, and an Abada hell is equal to 
twenty Nirrabuda hells ; and so in geomet- 
rical progression the Buddhist hells stretch on. 
All the details of torture appropriate to special 
sins are given, — flagellation by iron rods ; red- 
hot balls of iron for food ; spread embers and 
blazing pyres for beds. The doomed enter 
an iron pot, and are boiled there for a long 
time. 1 " Miserable indeed is the life here 
[in hell] which the man sees that commits 
sins." Here endeth the Sutta Nipata. 

In all this weltering mass of seething and 
burning and decaying imagery one sentence 
holds me as exact and literal truth. It is 
this : " One's deeds are not lost. They 

1 Some such picture we vividly remember among the text- 
books of our Christian childhood. 



106 HELL. 

will surely come back. Their master will 
meet with them. The fool who commits 
sin will feel the pain in himself in the other 
world." 

So be that law of retribution gets strongly 
put, I care little for the absurd and impossible 
illustrations of it. They will perish, but it 
will endure. " One's deeds are not lost; 
they will surely come back," — that is true 
Scripture, though written in Buddhist Sutta. 
" Their works do follow them," — that is 
more familiar Scripture, and it is profitable 
for admonition no less than comfort. But 
how much that is found both in the heathen 
and the Christian apocalypse is only true 
as symbol, — the perishing image doing ser- 
vice to light up the imperishable truth! 
A recent writer who has visited the island 
of Patmos where the book of Revelation 
was written, helps us to understand the 
physical features of that bewildering vision. 
The volcanic island of Thera (the beast, or 
as it is now called Santorin) is within sight 
of Patmos. There is exact agreement be- 
tween the phenomena presented by its erup- 



HELL. 107 

tions, described by travellers and historians, 
and the imagery of those tremendous pas- 
sages in Revelation beginning with the sixth 
chapter: "The sun became black as sack- 
cloth, and the moon became as blood. . . . The 
stars of heaven fell unto the earth, as a 
fig-tree casteth her untimely figs when she 
is shaken of a mighty wind. . . . And the 
heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled 
together, and every mountain and island was 
moved out of their places." This is a vivid, 
but not too vivid, description of a volcanic 
eruption and its attendant earthquake. It is 
probably a truthful image of what the revela- 
tor of Patmos either saw or heard in some 
eruption of Thera. So suggestive of the In- 
ferno are these phenomena that the cone of the 
volcano in Santorin harbor is to-day believed 
by many to be the entrance to hades, and 
u in the smoke which comes out of it the in- 
habitants of Thera imagine they see demons 
coming out." l The angel of the bottomless 
pit is called in the Greek tongue " Apollyon," 
and on Thera in ancient times there was a 

1 J. Thomas Bent, in Nineteenth Century, December 1888. 



108 HELL. 

temple to Apollo the Destroyer. This modern 
interpreter of Revelation thinks that the 
island of Thera furnished the imagery of the 
beast that was, and is not, and yet is, — that 
being a lively likeness of a volcano in its 
active, spent, and smouldering stages. 

But what profits it to puzzle over enigmatic 
imagery, and to seek out the devilish inven- 
tions of heathen religions and compare them 
with Christian or Judaean apocalyptic forms, 
if in so doing we blunt the edge of that just 
sense of retribution for sin which is behind 
all these visions and forebodings of a judg- 
ment to come ? Nothing. We are only driven 
to it by the excesses of popular Christianity, 
making more of the outward imagery of 
retribution than of its inner necessity and 
reality. That imagery preached as genuine 
reality and pushed to a literal endlessness, 
that metaphor made dogma, is the offence 
of the disangelical sects. That doctrine dis- 
honors God and demoralizes man, and causes 
more unbelief and rejection of Christianity 
than any other of its supposed teachings. 
Eternal punishment for the sins of a moment 



HELL. 109 

is plain injustice ; no explanation, authority, 
or argument can make it anything else to 
the moral sense. It is monstrous, untrue, 
maddening ; no lover of God will believe 
it of him. But a just retribution for sins 
is not only compatible with infinite love 
and fatherhood, but inseparable from any 
high conception of these gracious terms. In 
any right apprehension of heaven and hell, 
man should be as grateful for one as the other. 
Until we all come to " the measure of the ful- 
ness of the stature of Christ," we shall need 
to be deterred from sin by a just dread of its 
consequences, as well as won to holiness by 
the charm of its purity. 

Has not the time come for a new reading 
of the law of retribution for sin, and new 
illustrations of its changelessness ? Let men 
who are most afraid of physical pain take the 
sulphurous rhetoric of the revival alarmists 
for their portion ; but there are many per- 
sons in our day who are more disgusted than 
terrified by all that. The spirit, when deeply 
searched, is found not to be intimidated by 
threats of injury or suffering to itself. Its 



110 HELL. 

concern is always for others. Suppose, in- 
stead of seeking to alarm a man about his 
own future state, we should try to show him 
the effect on others of a single act of wrong- 
doing. Suppose we should only faintly realize 
the mischief and misery which every act of 
sin entails upon somebody, and should impart 
this realizing sense to other men. I doubt if 
there is a man alive who could bear the 
revelation of the harm he does whenever he 
consents to sin. It would overwhelm him 
with remorse ; he would repent, not because 
he feared hell, but because he so pitied the 
victims of his own wrong- doing. Nothing 
but knowledge is needed to make all men 
penitent. " They know not what they do." 
We hear of contagious diseases, and men fly 
from them as from fire. Who will tell us of 
contagious sins? And how shall we quar- 
antine against them? Every paper that 
crosses our threshold comes freighted with 
the germs of epidemic crime. Fumigation 
is not enough ; prohibition or conflagration 
is needed. Every crime breeds crime \ every 
sin begets a sinner. 



HELL. Ill 

But aside from the infection of sin and 
crime, there is the direct effect of them. 

The injured victim of violence or fraud, 
who can compensate him? The innocent 
friends and kindred of the disgraced man, 
who may console them or mitigate their 
sufferings? The child whose loving desire 
to hear of his lost parents, as years increase 
his intelligence, must be met by skilful eva- 
sion or shameful confession ! Mutual confi- 
dence between man and man, the basis of all 
social peace and happiness, how has it been 
shaken by this fault ! And self-respect, that 
sheet-anchor of a true manhood, who will 
recover that from the shipwreck of honor? 
So overwhelming are the reprisals of time 
for wrong-doing, that hardened criminals 
have been known to confess their crimes and 
almost rejoice at conviction, there being no 
punishment within the reach of human jus- 
tice to equal the awards of their offended 
nature. The pinch of this preaching may be 
felt, whatever a man's opinion concerning a 
future life. Even if he believed that death 
ended all consciousness for him, he could not 



112 HELL, 

fail to know that " the evil that men do, lives 
after them." Is it possible that any human 
being, fully knowing or vaguely apprehend- 
ing the catching nature of sin and the sure 
spread of evil tendency, wrong, and misery 
which would come from his one deed of 
shame, would do it ? I believe not. Putting 
himself and his miserable consciousness, or 
dead unconsciousness, out of the question, he 
would not like to leave such an eddy of dust 
in the wake of his life, blinding the eyes and 
soiling the lives of those who were travelling 
behind him. The very villain prefers not to 
be a nuisance. 

Oh that some Dante from the other 
world, with almost any good policeman still 
in the body, would make the rounds of this 
earth, and tell an attentive humanity what he 
sees ! I think we should need no other hell 
to intimidate sin. For w T here else are the 
victims of passion tossed to and fro with the 
winds of their strong desires more fatally 
than here, in lives where " reason by lust is 
swayed " ? Or where else does Cerberus 
break his fast on gluttonous men more 



HELL. 113 

furiously ? Let our heavenly Dante tell how 
cursefully the miserly and prodigal clash to- 
gether in business circles here ; how the 
wrathful " boil and bubble " in the Stygian 
lake of their own making ; how the unbe- 
lieving cry from their living tombs ; in what 
a river of blood the violent are plunged; 
how violators smart, and flatterers rot ; how 
simony reversing justice is itself reversed, 
the head of the worldly church dominated 
by the feet; how public thieves stick in 
their stealings, defiled by the pitch they 
handle ; how the hypocrites ache under the 
gilded lead with which they crown their 
heads; how evil counsellors for their lying 
tongues are lapped by tongues of flame ; 
how scandal-mongers limp at last, maimed 
by their own weapons; how cheats get 
cheated finally, and find their condemnation 
just; how betrayers most betray them- 
selves ! There is hardly a line in Dante's 
poem of judgment which might not be liter- 
ally translated into English and transferred to 
the retributions of this life ; and if it were, 
would not men shrink from its present real- 

8 



114 HELL. 

ity more fearfully than they now shudder 
at its questioned revelation of punishments 
to come? 

Retribution, — sin overtaken by its conse- 
quences ; evil made conscious that it is 
evil, — here or hereafter ; somewhere, any- 
where, — if this is hell, I believe in it. But 
if endless torment for transient wrong-doing, 
punishment that has no care for reforma- 
tion, consequences that Divine Love cannot 
redeem and overrule for good, a make- 
weight for heaven; eternal woe, a foil for 
eternal bliss, — if this be hell, I do not be- 
lieve in it. No, nor will until I cease to 
believe in the moral and mindful unity of 
the universe, in God its source, its provi- 
dence, and its end, and in him who said, a It 
is not the will of your Father in heaven that 
one of these little ones should perish." 



VII. 
HEAVEN. 



VII. 

HEAVEN. 

Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall 
give thee the desires of thine heart. — Psalm 
xxxvii. 4. 

IT EAVEN is the fulfilment of the heart's 
desires^ — the satisfaction of its in- 
most want. 

A granted wish always makes a happy 
heart ; but it may not make a heart always 
happy. Some wishers lose their joy almost 
as soon as they get their wish. These wishes 
do not correspond to the real want of the 
heart. Therefore we said of heaven, " It is 
the fulfilment of the heart's desires/' mean- 
ing by that the satisfaction of the heart's 
inmost want. If we could recall the distinc- 
tion between " wishes " and " wants/' as it is 
observed in the old hymn, — 

" Not what we wish, but what we want, 
Let mercy still supply," — 



118 HE A VEN. 



then we might say that the happiness of 
heaven consists in the satisfaction of the 
heart's wants, while the lesser and ordinary 
happiness of earth consists in the fulfilment 
of the heart's wishes. 

It is interesting and profitable to note 
the coincidence between the conclusions of 
Buddhism and Christianity on this subject, 
despite their wide contrast in philosophy and 
practice. According to Buddhism, the peace 
of nirvana consists in the cessation of desires 
by their extinction. According to Christianity, 
the rest and joy of heaven consist in the 
cessation of desires by their fulfilment. The 
one is eternal denial; the other, eternal sat- 
isfaction. The one dismisses the soul at last, 
as the dew-drop that falls from the lotus-leaf 
into the flood; the other welcomes the soul 
into the joy of its Lord, and, as it were, 
makes the lotus-flower itself, with the image 
of the sun in its heart, co-eternal with its 
Lord. 

Saint Benedict says to Dante, when they 
meet in the seventh heaven, — 



HE A VEN. 119 



il Brother ! ... in the last sphere 
Expect completion of thy lofty aim ; 
For there on each desire completion waits, 
And there on mine ; where every aim is found 
Perfect, entire, and for fulfilment ripe." 

And in the very first heaven, Piccarda 
tells this inquirer in Paradise, asking if the 
dwellers there do not long for a higher 
place, " more to behold and more in love to 
dwell," — 

" Our will is settled in composure by the power of charity, 
Who makes us will alone 
What we possess, and nought beyond desire." 

And after the explanation, Dante says, — 

" Then saw I clearly how each spot in heaven 
Is Paradise ; though with like gracious dew 
The supreme virtue shower not over all." 

If one must have a vision of the things 
unseen and eternal, I know not where he 
will get it in likelier or fairer imagery than 
in Dante's Paradiso. The Gospels are silent 
as the Sphinx as to heaven's scenery or ex- 
ternal condition. The Book of Revelation has 
scenery and vividness enough, but the most 
abject literalist would hardly claim exact- 



120 HE A VEN. 



ness in the pictures it draws. Dante's 
" white rose " of heavenly spirits is certain- 
ly as sweet a flower as ever grew on any 
apocalyptic stem. The opening sentence of 
the Paradiso contains as good an introduction 
to heaven as can be written : — 

" His glory, by whose might all things are moved, 
Pierces the universe, and in one part 
Sheds more resplendence ; elsewhere less. In heaven, 
That largeliest of His light partakes, was I." 

There are passages in the canonical Rev- 
elation of unequalled tenderness and beauty, 
and they will always stand as lights to them 
" that sit in darkness and in the shadow of 
death." They who are arrayed in white 
robes, and their singing unto God, serv- 
ing night and day in His temple, neither 
hungering nor thirsting, and for evermore 
shaded from the smiting sun; the Lamb 
their shepherd, and God their consolation, 
wiping away all tears from their eyes, — 
this vision of angels will never pass away. 
And the pure river of the water of life, 
with its fruitful banks and their monthly 
harvests; the servants of God at work in 



HE A VEN. 121 



the neighboring fields, His name in their 
foreheads; and the Spirit and the Church 
inviting whosoever will to come and take 
of the water of life freely, — these celestial 
imaginings will live to shape our thoughts of 
heaven, and save us from that " false imagina- 
tion " wherewith we "make ourselves dull/' 

The argument in favor of these and all 
like imaginations is that which Dante him- 
self offers, — 

" from things sensible alone ye learn 
That which, digested rightly, after turns 
To intellectual." 

And likewise the apostle Paul writes to the 
Romans : " The invisible things of Him from 
the creation of the w r orld are clearly seen, be- 
ing understood by the things that are made ; 
even His eternal power and Godhead." 

Earth rightly known, is heaven truly di- 
vined. Of this truth Plato and Swedenborg, 
with their doctrine of correspondencies, are 
witnesses, — the one before Christ, the other 
after him. 

Emanuel Swedenborg claimed, and his 
disciples believe, that it was " granted him to 



122 HE A VEN. 



be admitted into the society of angels, and to 
converse with them as one man converses with 
another ; and also to see the things that exist 
in heaven, and those that exist in hell." 

Without pronouncing positively on the 
reality of this claim, it may be admitted that 
there is much of reason, sense, and probability 
in Swedenborg's disclosures. The doctrine of 
correspondencies of which he makes so much, 
according to which everything on earth has its 
celestial equivalent, and everything in heaven 
has its earthly equivalent, gives a sort of nat- 
ural and so far credible look to his pictures 
of heaven. If some of these delineations of 
spiritual things seem material and common, 
they are all the more comprehensible by peo- 
ple who are still in the body. Indeed, it is 
this human naturalness which Swedenborg 
carries into the abode, government, relations, 
occupations, and uses of the world to come, 
which gives his teaching on these matters 
such a purchase upon his disciples' belief. A 
natural logic runs through his discourses up- 
on heaven and hell; and in the enjoyment 
afforded by his fidelity to principles and his 



HE A VEN. 123 



spiritual mindedness we do not much regard 
the physical setting of the revelation. He 
may or may not have been admitted into 
angelic company, and learned his teachings 
there. The rarity , not to say the singularity, 
of such an experience exposes it to general 
suspicion. If it be said that in these days of 
spiritism no such singularity attaches to Swe- 
denborg's revelations, we reply that, so far as 
we know, nothing comparable to his sweetly 
reasonable and spiritually minded discourse 
has yet emanated from modern spiritism. 

Briefly stated, these views present the fol- 
lowing features : that the divine sphere of the 
Lord [that is, Jesus] constitutes heaven ; that 
there are two kingdoms in heaven, one of 
celestial and the other of spiritual beings ; 
that there are numerous societies there, each 
a miniature heaven, and each member himself 
a little heaven ; that things on earth have their 
correspondencies in heaven, and vice versa ; 
that the sun of the natural world is not visi- 
ble in heaven, but the Lord is its sun, divine 
truth its light, and divine love its heat; 
that the angels are in progressive states of 



124 HE A VEN. 



being ; that these states of being take the 
place of time and space, neither of which 
notions enters into heavenly calculations ; 
that by eternity the angels have a perception 
of an infinite state, not of an infinite time ; 
that dwellings, governments, worship, preach- 
ing, power, speech, writing, and more varied 
occupations than those of earth are found in 
heaven; that wisdom, innocence, peace, sim- 
plicity, joy, and happiness dwell there; that 
those who die in infancy grow up under 
angelic governesses in that great " cloister's 
stillness and seclusion ; " that wise and chari- 
table souls of all nations enter there; that 
neither riches nor poverty are preferred, but 
both rich and poor are received on other 
grounds ; that marriage in heaven means the 
union of two in one, as of the understanding 
and the will, the wedded pair being of one 
mind, " and of such it is said that they are 
not two but one ; therefore in heaven two 
married partners are not called two, but one 
angel." The picture closes with a generous 
illustration of the immensity of heaven, of its 
really infinite room and hospitality. 



HEAVEN. 125 



In the unfolding of his revelations on these 
themes, Swedenborg uses his opportunity to 
utter many noble and beautiful beliefs. The 
man who at the outset gets impatient of the 
claim which Swedenborg makes of supernat- 
ural communication, or of the seeming trivi- 
alities, conceits, forced and fanciful interpre- 
tations of Scripture, arbitrary substitution 
of new meanings for old words, and thus in 
his impatience closes the book or pushes it 
aside, will lose much that is worthy his 
consideration. For example, I would not 
like to lose so profound a truth, so simply 
stated, as this : " The quality of the life 
of every one is the same as that of his 
love'' Or this : " Heaven exists wherever 
the Lord is acknowledged, believed in, and 
loved. And the various modes of worshipping 
him, proceeding from that variety of good in 
various societies, are not injurious but advan- 
tageous ; for the perfection of heaven is the 
result of that variety." 

We must assign a lesser value perhaps to 
the statement about the distribution of the 
angels according to the points of the com- 



126 HE A VEN. 



pass : " All the societies in heaven, situated 
toward the east excel those toward the west, 
and those toward the south excel those to- 
ward the north." 

His illustration of the independence of 
time which heavenly states possess is good. 
That the length or shortness of time depends 
upon the state of the person is shown, he 
says, by the time's passing quickly to " those 
who are in agreeable and cheerful states," 
and slowly " to those who are in disagreeable 
and melancholy ones." 

Here is a jewel of truth : " To be of use 
is the delight of life among all. It hence is 
evident that the Lord's kingdom is a king- 
dom of uses." 

What a relief from the warring debates 
of less liberal sects discussing the possibility 
of salvation for the heathen, is this grand 
utterance: "The Lord's Church is universal, 
existing with all who acknowledge a divine 
Being and live in charity ; all of whom like- 
wise are instructed by angels after their de- 
cease, and then receive divine truths." And 
how well and nobly he interprets the text 



HE A VEN. 127 



which is both the stumbling-block and step- 
ping-stone of progressive Orthodoxy, — that 
without the Lord there is no salvation. " The 
way in which that truth is to be understood/' 
observes Swedenborg, is that " there can be 
no salvation except from the Lord. There 
are in the universe numerous earths, and 
all full of inhabitants ; scarcely any of them 
know that the Lord assumed humanity in our 
planet ; but nevertheless, as they adore the 
divine Being under a human form, they are 
accepted and led by the Lord." This teacher 
even thinks that souls of devout gentiles 
will prove more receptive of a saving Christ 
than the Christians of his day. He found 
some excellent souls from China who were 
all ready to receive a saving knowledge of 
the Lord when he tried to give it to them ; 
only they did not like it in the name of 
Christ, because that name had become repug- 
nant to them on the earth, where they had 
known Christians who led worse lives than 
they did, and were void of charity. " But 
when I simply called Jesus, Lord," says 
Swedenborg, " they exhibited an interior emo- 



128 HE A VEN. 



tion." It takes those good heathen some time 
after they enter the life to come, to throw 
off the prejudices against Christianity which 
the behavior of nominal Christians here has 
excited in them. He says : — 

44 Of all Gentiles, the Africans are most esteemed in 
heaven ; for they receive the goods and truths of 
heaven more easily than others. . . . They who dwell 
in heaven are continually advancing toward the ver- 
nal season of life, and the more thousands of years 
they live there, the more delightful and happy is the 
state of Spring to which they attain ; and this goes 
on to eternhty, with continual increments, according 
to the progressions and degrees of their love, charit}-, 
and faith. Those of the female sex, who had died 
old women, quite worn out with age, but who had 
lived by faith in the Lord, in charity toward their 
neighbor and in happy conjugal love with their hus- 
bands, come more and more in the course of years 
into the flower of youth, accompanied by such beauty 
as surpasses every idea of beauty ever perceptible 
to the sight. . . . The form when viewed is that of 
beauty unspeakable, affecting with charity the very 
inmost life of the mind. In one word, in heaven to 
grow old is to grow young." 

More familiar than these visions of Sweden- 
borg are the gratuitous imaginings of those 



HE A VEN. 129 



popular writers who have given us such 
books as the " Gates Ajar" and the "Little 
Pilgrim ; " and if it be confessed that there 
is no other foundation for any of their views 
a-wing, as we may say, than their own pious 
imagination, then one may read such books 
with profit. Indeed, the " Gates Ajar " when 
it was first published broke upon the religious 
and reading public almost with the author- 
ity of a revelation. It was a great relief 
from utter spiritual vagueness on the one 
hand and apocalyptic moonshine on the other. 
And withal it had such an air of probability 
about it, so much truth to what was known 
and natural ; it so chimed in with our notion 
that death was not a break in the continuity 
of character but rather a knot, as it were, in 
the same long thread of human progress and 
destiny, — that the readers of the book be- 
lieved it even when they said they doubted. 
The survival after death of the last absorb- 
ing emotion before that event, as shown in 
the homely incident of the rude farmer's first 
thought in heaven for the potatoes he had 
only half dug on earth, has a wholesome nat- 

9 



130 HE A VEN. 



uralness about it ; and the freedom with 
which a young girl whose greatest longing 
here had been to own a piano, was as- 
sured that she should have her wish granted 
hereafter, reminds one of Luther's audacious 
letter to his little son, promising him all 
sorts of toys and candies in heaven. 

The " Little Pilgrim " has even more 
naturalness in its descriptions, though not 
on so common a level. And whether true 
or not it is often good enough to be true; 
and it is full of a certain likelihood, if 
indeed there is any likeness between the 
life which now is and the life which is to 
come. 

But I am not concerned to espouse or 
defend any of these books, not even the 
views of Swedenborg as to the details of 
the life which is to come. Better is the 
reticence of Paul, who does not deem it 
permitted him to disclose the scenes of 
that third heaven to which he was caught 
up. And better far the golden silence of 
Jesus as to these heavenly situations, for 
if he told us of earthly things and we 



HE A VEJV. 131 



believed not, how could he tell us of 
heavenly things? Wiser far, and no doubt 
better for us, is the formless canopy of the 
sky in which the spiritual heavens lie con- 
cealed by their very excess of brightness ; 
for the kingdom of heaven cometh not 
with observation, but shall be within you. 
Men and women who insist on some con- 
descension to sense, before they will believe 
in the unseen world, know not what they 
ask. If their demand could be granted, 
the heaven that submitted to be seen, 
must in time submit to be done away; for 
the things that are seen are of time, and 
only the things that are unseen are of 
eternity. 

This is no dictum of Paul merely. It is 
the cold prophecy as well of modern science. 
For it is claimed now to be among the 
assured facts of creation, that all visible 
worlds were the outcome of the invisible 
ether, and in the natural order of things 
must, after innumerable years, return to 
the invisible source from which they sprang. 
A heaven, therefore, with bounds and habi- 



132 HEA VEN. 



tations, houses and barns, horses and sheep, 
beasts and dragons, coals and candle-sticks, 
books and thrones, walls and doors, lamps 
and glassy seas, vials and seals, trumpets 
and keys, pearly gates and golden streets 
would be no advance, so far as permanence 
is concerned, over the world in which we live. 
And such writings as portray the life to come 
in this visionary fashion must be treated as 
purely symbolic, and in no other sense de- 
scriptive of the life of which they treat. 

Suppose in place of these and all other 
showy and vocal parodies of heaven, we 
should fall back on the testimony of Jesus, 
and try more and more to realize that 
kingdom which cometh not with observa- 
tion, but shall be within us. The poorest of 
us have some spiritual experience to begin 
with ; we have known once and again the 
self-approval which follows accepted duty. 
Here is something purely and wholly spirit- 
ual, and w T e have all experienced it. Why 
is not that the stuff of which heavens are 
made ? When I think of the soul, with right 
mind discerning what is true and with free- 



HE A VEJV. 133 



will strongly choosing it, all the accidents 
of individual fortune are as nothing beside 
the majesty of its worth. The ordained sun 
and moon are not so splendid as this free 
soul, taking heaven itself by the violence of 
its virtuous resolution. When man does his 
duty amid perils, then the kingdom of heaven 
is at hand. If we may not portray it, it is 
not for want of illustrious examples. Once 
seen in its beauty or known in its peace, no 
other sign or symbol of heaven 's reality 
can compete with it. It stands to him 
who knows it, more awful than thrones and 
more atoning than the blood of sacrifices; 
and he turns even from the hosannahs of 
angels, to listen to the still, small voice of 
an approving conscience. 

And who is so poor that he has not known 
the living riches of disinterested love, or love 
at least that is only selfish in the pardonable 
longing to be loved in return? Swedenborg 
has reserved for the life to come the more 
than golden rule, " Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor better than thyself." But loving hearts 
have discovered this superhuman affection 



134 HE A VEN. 



even here; and mothers praying for their 
children; fathers over-toiling for their sons; 
patriots dying for their country; lovers 
finding self-denial for their loved one a 
noble self- indulgence ; friends who count 
nothing their own to enjoy until they have 
given it to one another; those lawful sui- 
cides who choose short lives of generous 
service above length of indolent days, — these 
all attest the presence even here in this 
world of a heavenly affection, which finds 
its self-fulfilment in the fulness of its self- 
surrender. In spiritual traits like these I 
see the lines of the kingdom of heaven. 

I see, too, in these foregleams of immor- 
tality the sure word of prophecy which 
predicts a life hereafter. For though we 
may not and cannot in the nature of 
things have the proof of unembodied spir- 
itual life by any evidence of sense, never- 
theless, we have a reasonable justification of 
our faith in these moments of soul-freedom 
and pure spiritual life and joy, in which the 
body has no part. The cosmic philosopher 
says that " the absence of testimony does not 



HE A VEN. - 135 



raise a negative presumption except in cases 
where testimony is accessible ; " * and he de- 
clares his trust in a future spiritual life, and 
its independence of such proofs or disproofs 
as science, properly so called, can supply. 

The imagery of heaven-enraptured men 
may and probably will go the w^ay of all 
images ; but trust in a spiritual life surviving 
this life of blended soul and sense remains 
inviolate, and we may console ourselves for 
the unsubstantiality of the image by the 
permanence of the things it stands for. 

To men and women convicted of duty or 
enamoured of unselfish love, there are no 
possible surprises of outward glory in an- 
other world which can surpass or equal the 
modest comfort of their God-abiding souls. 
If heaven exists wherever God is ac- 
knowledged, believed in, and loved, as 
Swedenborg has said, then surely men may 
have a foretaste of it here. And if, dis- 
missing from their minds or desires all 
that changing scenery and visionary back- 
ground on which the popular imagination 

1 John Fiske : The Destiny of Man. 



136 HE A VEN. 



fixes itself so passionately, they would look 
for heaven in a moment of unalloyed wor- 
ship or an hour of unselfish service, I believe 
that a consciousness would come to them as 
it came to the astonished patriarch in the 
seemingly unpeopled desert, — " Surely God 
is in this place, and I knew it not." As on 
some lowering day, when we anxiously scan 
the heavens to find some sign of clearing 
weather, we rejoice to see only enough of 
the blue sky to robe an infant, and joyfully 
assure ourselves that the fleeting clouds will 
roll away because the eternal ether has 
shone through them, — so we confirm our 
souls in the reality of a heavenly world and 
its victory over sin and death, in virtue of 
moments of heavenly experience here and 
foreshinings of the over- world beyond. 

As we value our hope of a blessed life 
hereafter and reunion with the loved and 
lost of earth, let us give ourselves to that 
life of duty and love which has most affinity 
for the life that never ends. Let us seek in 
service of our fellow-men and worship of the 
Eternal those anticipations of a world in 



HE A VEN. 137 



which, while we cease from our labors, our 
works follow us. And let us begin here and 
now that ascending career, in which death is 
only a resting-place by the wayside. 

And then, at the last, when w r e are made 
ready for the vision, by being long denied 
it, we shall find ourselves seeing no longer 
through a glass darkly, but face to face ; and 
* n j°y unspeakable we shall see — 

" Those angel faces smile, 
Which we have loved long since 
And lost awhile.'' 



VIII. 
A CHURCH. 



vin. 

A CHURCH. 

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. — 
Gen. xxviii. 16. 

' I "HE principle of development now ad- 
mitted by Biblical scholars, and ap- 
plied to the Scriptures, is a great help in 
their interpretation. When the Bible was 
taken as an inspired entity, one part as 
spiritually competent as another, the reader 
of its books had to go lightly over the coals 
and cinders of the earlier periods; and his 
successful journeying among these primitive 
annals was not a little due to such aids as 
the wings of faith alone could supply. But 
to-day all competent critics agree that the 
Bible is the record of a gradually developing 
^religion, and therefore they expect to find 
in its pages the ideas that suit successive 
periods. Jacob evidently lived at a time 
when the Hebrew idea of God had not risen 



142 A CHURCH. 



to the conception of a universal spirit. Je- 
hovah, or Jahveh, was a local deity, one of 
the "gods many" of that ancient day. To 
Jacob's mind Jahveh was the strongest of 
the gods, but not the only one. 

In changing his residence, Jacob naturally 
thought he was moving from the jurisdiction 
of Jahveh into the territory of some other 
deity. It was a genuine surprise to him, 
when in visions' of the night the revelation 
was made that Jahveh was also in the new 
country to which he had travelled: "Surely 
God is in this place, and I knew it not." 
The story has no meaning on any other 
hypothesis than that Jacob believed in 
Jehovah as a local deity. In leaving Beer- 
sheba Jacob had lost Jahveh. Who should 
take his place? 

I have chosen this crisis in the life of 
Jacob because it represents, in a pictorial 
and personal way, the condition of all men 
who in the passage from youth to maturity 
or from ignorance to comparative knowledge, 
find themselves separated from their old-time 
faiths. The Jehovah of their childhood is 



A CHURCH. 143 



no longer their God. Hardly a thing that 
is told of him in the ancient Scriptures cor- 
responds to their present need. The man- 
like imagery which astonished and attracted 
their youthful imaginations seems like pro- 
fanity now; the fitful temper and variable 
purposes with which a childlike generation 
invested its deity, shocks and repels their 
adult intelligence. If the Scriptures contain- 
ing such representations of God maintain 
any hold upon their interest or attention, 
it is due either to a habit of reverence in 
which they have been reared, or to a reli- 
gious tone in the Bible which appeals to 
their spiritual ear more powerfully than its 
sometimes partial and unworthy thoughts 
offend their intelligence, or else to a histori- 
cal taste which finds worth and significance 
in the first attempts of man to explain the 
phenomena with which he is surrounded. 
Either way, the God of his early faith is left 
behind, and the spiritual wanderer is in the 
wilderness, alone and unchurched. 

This fairly represents the situation of a 
growing number of men and women in Chris- 



144 A CHURCH, 



tendom to-day. They have left Beersheba; 
they have no further use for its symbols and 
sacrifices ; only by poetical license can they 
repeat its imagery, and when asked to ac- 
cept such imagery as sober science and veri- 
table fact, they are compelled to refuse. 

The situation is full of pathos. Even Ja- 
cob, whose behavior theretofore had not been 
such as to make us very pitiful toward him, 
arouses our sympathy when he is alone in 
the desert. Away from his doting father, away 
from his scheming mother ; an exile from the 
settlement he has made so profitable ; out of 
one place, and not yet fixed in another, — all 
the trembling sympathy which indecision and 
uncertainty always attract, gathers around Ja- 
cob and his like in every age and land. 

What, if anything, can we do to help the 
present Jacobs, — those exiles from the past, 
not yet arrived in sight of the future, and 
perplexed and lost in the unsettled present ? 
Before we part company with Jacob, if in- 
deed we should part from him, I think we 
may learn a lesson as to the next step. He 
made pillows out of the unpromising stones 



A CHURCH. 145 



that strewed the wilderness, and went to 
sleep. If sleep cannot solve doubts, it can 
release us from their torment; it can also 
refresh the powers that are exhausted by 
their attempt upon the Infinite. Not in 
indifference, but in grateful acceptance of 
"Nature's sweet restorer," I would counsel 
the modern Jacob to sleep. He will gain 
nothing by letting his loneliness get the 
better of him, or the sense of his losses out- 
weigh his reasonable prospects. Doubts make 
hard pillows, but Jacob slept well on the 
stones of the field, and his " folded eyes saw 
brighter colors than the open ever see." 
Take what is at hand, and make that the 
resting-place for your tired head. Sleep, and 
a vision of angels may be in store for you. 
That way lies renewal of courage and hope. 
I like to pursue the imagery of this old 
story yet further, and believe that out of 
the very stones thus humbly accepted and 
used to-day, the altar of to-morrow's praise 
shall be reared. As the hymn saith, — 

" Out of my stony griefs 
Bethel I'll raise." 
10 



146 A CHURCH. 



But story and imagery aside, where if any- 
where shall the modern man, touched with 
the melancholy of discovered error and not 
yet blessed with the light of discovered truth 
in religion, find rest ? He cannot rest in 
mere negation. The discovery that stones 
are not bread never fed anybody; nor will 
the Son of man consent to turn stones into 
bread. In place of false gods, we must find 
the true. No peace for us else. And how 
shall we find Him in any other way than by 
opening our minds to all the truth which 
comes to us from every quarter ? If in this 
way we find our conception of God outgrow- 
ing its traditional clothing, need we be sorry 
for that? The garments are not the god. 
Are we such infants that we do not know 
mother or father because forsooth they come 
to us in new clothing? What I wish to say 
in this too familiar likeness is, that God is not 
lost to us because we have gained a new sym- 
bol of Him larger than the old symbol of our 
childhood. We imagine, just as Jacob imag- 
ined, that Jahveh is only where his altar is, 
and that Beersheba's grove or Moriah's 



A CHURCH. 147 



mount are his abiding- place. But when we 
leave the old tabernacles, and camp in the 
wilderness, with its infinite arch and broad 
horizon wall, lo ! God is there, " and we knew 
it not." We need to learn that wherever we 
are, we are with God and He is with us ; that 
no walls confine Him, no creeds tether Him, 
no altars enshrine Him, no church monopo- 
lizes Him, and no place is His peculiar abode. 
It was a great step onward in the develop- 
ment of religion when Jacob learned that 
Jahveh was no local deity. And we have to 
learn the same truth in our turn. For to 
many men the realizing sense of God is 
bound up with certain places where they wor- 
shipped Him, or with certain rites and cere- 
monies, or with certain phrases or forms of doc- 
trine in which they have been wont to express 
their thought of Him. They feel away from 
Him when they miss the terms which custom 
has endeared or sanctified to them. I am not 
sure but this is the service which the various 
religions and sects of the world are appointed 
to do for us. And only when we learn to find 
God in them all and away from them all, will 



148 A CHURCH. 



their mission be ended and their differences 
swallowed up in a higher unity. 

I learn also from Jacob's story, viewed as a 
stage in religious evolution, that the way of 
growth is by the entrance of larger meanings 
into the great categories of religious thought. 
Jahveh was Jahveh still, though Jacob's 
thought of him was increased by a world's 
full span. And we shall gain nothing by 
denying God because we have learned some- 
thing of the infinite scale on which He works : 
that should rather furnish us new reason for 
believing in Him. It was the littleness of 
the old view which made it untenable. Now, 
with all the new illustration of His working 
furnished by natural science, human history, 
and individual experience better understood, 
we have a thousand times as much reason 
for believing in God as when we thought 
of Him in the narrower terms of a child- 
ish imagination and a mythical philosophy. 
What we have outgrown is not Deity, but 
our poor idea of Deity; what we have left 
behind is not Jehovah, but Beersheba. 

I counsel men who find themselves in this 



A CHURCH. 149 



strait in the wilderness, between a dead past 
and an unborn future in religion, not to lose 
confidence that the present also is none other 
than the house of God and, if they will, the 
gate of heaven. 

With so much of introduction, let me say 
a few words concerning Religion and the 
Church, its representative. 

The basis of religion is, I suppose, the 
recognition of an Unseen Power working in 
and through man and Nature, and by infer- 
ence transcending both. The typical forms 
of religion in our day take their characteris- 
tics from the different fields in which their 
exponents pursue their inquiries. The nat- 
uralist finds his evidence of this unseen 
power in Nature ; the positivist, or human- 
ist, in man; the Romanist, in his Church; 
the Protestant, in his book. All agree in 
predicating the unknowableness of God, in 
some sense. But this ignorance is relieved 
in part, to the naturalist, through the study 
of the works, or better the working, of the 
Unseen Power. 



150 A CHURCH. 



The humanist takes what he can find 
in aggregate humanity for his revelation 
of God, while Church and Bible offer to 
the churchman his evidence of " things not 
seen." In my reckoning these men are all 
theists, and may all be religious ; but their 
religions differ with their conceptions of God. 
The controversies in which they engage help 
the truth, by showing the insufficiency of 
either form of religion when taken by itself. 
The God to whom they bear witness is not 
only " through all/' as the naturalist says, 
and "in you all" as the humanist says, and 
" above all " as the supernaturalist says ; 
but He is " above all, and through all, and 
in you all," as Paul says. And that man is 
most complete in the knowledge of God, 
who seeks and finds the proof of Him in 
all these ways. 

I would like a church, therefore, which 
would openly receive its testimony from all 
these sources, and confide in the harmony of 
truth to finally reconcile its various voices. 
Such a church hardly exists to-day, but it 
is slowly forthcoming. The problem set us 



A CHURCH, 151 



is to do what we can to make it possible 
and to bring it near. In that task, I doubt 
not, all have their part to perform. Let the 
Romanist do his part, only adding to his faith 
in Beersheba the revelation of Padan-aram, 
and thus illustrating catholicity by inclusion 
instead of exclusion. Let the Protestant do 
likewise, for he too has his local Deity, and 
fears to find Jehovah outside the Bible. Let 
our humanist friends take a leaf from their 
fellow-agnostics the naturalists, and let the 
latter return the compliment, both agreeing 
with the canonical writer that the " invisible 
things of God from the creation of the world 
are clearly seen, being understood by the 
things that are made." And thus all work- 
ing together and contributing of their dis- 
coveries to the common fund of human 
knowledge, may we come to a religion 
which ignores no discovered truth, a science 
that searches all things at the command of 
religion, and a humanity which holds fast 
that which is good! This larger thought 
of God is the first condition of the new 
Church and the true religion. 



152 A CHURCH. 



Growing out of the thought of God comes 
prayer, which is instinctive petition to Al- 
mighty Power ; and praise, which is admi- 
ration finding voice. This is worship. 

Increasing knowledge and experience seem 
to show that the Supreme Power works by 
and with human co-operation ; and thus the 
thought of service enters into religion, and 
ways and means present themselves in great 
variety whereby we hope and try to further 
the divine purpose and accomplish its ends. 
This adds work for God to worship of Him, 
and the two express the business of a 
church. 

Again, as life goes on we find that our 
companions drop out, one by one. We have 
loved them ; we miss them ; we long to 
see them again. We begin to wonder if it 
may not be possible that they and we may 
meet again ; or else, on the other hand, we 
fear we may meet those whom we do not 
love. Fed by these desires and fears, the 
hope or dread of a future life springs up in 
us; and that enters into the subject-matter 
of religion. 



A CHURCH. 153 



Again, man as we now find him has a 
developed moral sense and a feeling of his 
indebtedness to do the right. This is so 
large a part of religion that some would 
make it the all-in-all. But religion as com- 
monly conceived includes the thought of 
God, the supreme object of worship and 
service, Immortal Life, and Duty. These 
are commonly regarded as the essentials of 
religion. Every religious association includes 
one or all of them. 

But further : historically considered, every 
religious establishment among men has some 
prominent person, who taught, exemplified, or 
incarnated its religious principles. Among 
these is Jesus the Christ, or " anointed one." 
Around him Christianity has built its church. 
He, as Christians believe, best represented 
and commended religious principles. Chris- 
tians, therefore, are called by his name. Thus 
far, all who call themselves by that name 
are agreed. 

But in the administration of the Church 

a large number of sects and schools has 

\j~ arisen, each of which ascribes peculiar value 



154 A CHURCH. 



to its peculiar forms of doctrine, worship, 
or government. Some of them go so far in 
their devotion to their form that they iden- 
tify it with the substance of the Christian 
religion, and seriously doubt whether that 
substance exists where their form is not 
found. " Nothing genuine unless it bears 
our label," they say, with other venders of 
one or another patent cure. The proof of 
the medicine, however, is less in the bottle 
than in its contents and their observed 
effects. It may well happen that, like min- 
eral waters, one spring will suit one patient 
and another another. Only let us realize 
that both patients are drinking water, and 
that religion springs and bubbles up among 
all sects, all religions, and all peoples. 

Not to confuse ourselves, however, with 
this broad generalization, only using it as 
a sort of accepted background, — let us ask 
ourselves the practical and pressing ques- 
tion, " What to-day and here is the possible 
and profitable church or religious organiza- 
tion for us?" 

Every age is a critical one in its own 



A CHURCH. 155 



eyes. Earnest Christian people are always 
inclined to think that their Christ is brought 
to the edge of the cliff, as in the old time, 
and that he is about to be thrown down. 
But he escapes out of the hands of his per- 
secutors, and Christianity survives its detrac- 
tors and would-be destroyers. It survives, 
because it really contains clear and positive 
answers to man's eternal questions, "Who 
is God?" "What is Duty?" and "Is there 
a Life Eternal?" 

The further question, " What think ye of 
Christ? " which most Christian sects have made 
preliminary to the other three questions and 
seemingly more important, is only important 
as affecting his testimony and influence. 
Any thought of Christ which preserves his 
competency as a revealer of spiritual truth 
and his potency as a quickener of the reli- 
gious life, is sufficient. The churches have 
made too much of their various opinions 
on the nature and offices of Jesus. Any 
view upon these subjects w r hich promotes 
the love of God and man, the knowledge 
and choice of right, and the hope of immor- 



156 A CHURCH. 



tality based on the experience of eternal life, 
is enough. 

Can we find or make a church thus mod- 
erate in its demands upon our belief, and at 
the same time earnest and efficient in its 
elevating effect upon our lives ? That is 
the problem we have before us. 

No self-respecting man is irreligious by 
choice. Nor is he satisfied, even if he could 
do it, to be religious by himself. He loves 
companionship in religion ; and he needs 
such companionship in order to fill out the 
pattern of religion and give scope to its 
benevolent impulses. 

What shall he do about it ? Many of the 
existing churches insist upon his accepting 
formularies of truth which he can only re- 
peat in a double sense ; or if they do not 
urge these creeds in all their fulness upon 
him, their services all the while involve the 
questionable doctrines and assume his faith 
in them. I know that every association car- 
ries some such implication with it. You 
give as well as take, when you consent to 
train with any company. But it is a fair 



A CHURCH. 157 



question which company most respects your 
mental honesty, and least contradicts your 
real opinions. Train with that company ! 

The people who do this, intelligently and 
faithfully, are in their right places. I would 
not disturb them if I could. If, however, in 
the operation of causes that are all about us, — 
in the thought, discovery, discussion, and in- 
tercommunication of this curious and social 
age, — men come to desire religious associa- 
tions consistent with their changed belief, they 
should be free to find or make them, without 
reproach and without suspicion of infidelity. 

The church we covet and for which we 
labor is a religious association freed from the 
contradictions of doctrine and tyrannies of 
administration which still survive in the Ro- 
man and semi-Roman churches of Christen- 
dom. It stands for the fundamental realities 
of religion, — " God over all, through all, and 
in you all ; " patient continuance in well- 
doing His requirement ; eternal life its re- 
ward; and Jesus Christ the bright exponent 
and surety of man's possible oneness with the 
Father. On this basis of religious truth, this 



158 A CHURCH. 



church starts its various agencies for human 
helpfulness with the freedom of adaptation 
to present needs which the Universal Spirit 
shows in the multitudinous forms in Nature. 

Given the conscious calling of God to be 
fellow-laborers with Him as dear children, we 
go about our Father's business, and whatever 
our hands find to do, we try to do it with 
all our hearts. The partition wall between 
things secular and things religious is broken 
down. Nothing is secular that is done for 
God ; nothing is sacred that is done for self. 
The whole world of human society is thrown 
open before us ; we enter upon it as the nat- 
ural field for our religious service. Nothing 
human is indifferent to us. Whatever makes 
for a higher man or a better society is a part 
of our business as Christian people. Every- 
thing is religious which is done religiously. 
And in the ciiltus which we would secure for 
growing men, there is room and need for 
whatever makes a fuller mind, a better phy- 
sique, a riper understanding, a sweeter tem- 
per, a larger charity, a devouter soul, and 
a higher life. 



A CHURCH. 159 



If any find themselves in these days, like 
Jacob of old, unsettled and wandering, and 
not yet awake to the assurance that they 
have not parted from God because they 
have left behind them His familiar altars, 
I would that the revelation of His presence 
with them in this time and place also might 
be made to them, and that they might find 
the land in which they dwell none other 
than the house of God and the gate of 
heaven, and this latter day a day which 
the Lord hath made. 



University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



1361-2*/ 



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